The Infinite Future

by Tim Wirkus

  And that’s the other thing. They keep expecting the lake bottom to appear at any second because they’ve been descending for a really long time, but below them there’s just more blue, darker and darker blue, and after a while, it’s the same above them as well. No sunlight, just dark water. At this point they realize that the tech on this planet is much more advanced than it seemed at first. The dive suits are flimsy looking, but are helping their bodies withstand a crazy amount of pressure.

  Well, they keep falling, and Salgado-MacKenzie keeps ratcheting up the suspense, doing a really nice job of it too, and then finally the shipmates see something. At first it’s just a blurry outline below them, but the farther down they go, they see that it’s an enormous building, all wavy metal and smooth contours, a really organic looking structure, but shiny too. As they get closer, it becomes clear that this structure is colossal, bigger even than the village they’ve just come from. As far as they can tell, the building has no windows or doors. It’s all smooth, undulating metal.

  Apparently there are doors, though, because one opens up directly below the divers. It’s more of a hatch, really, but the important thing is, the opening is pulling everyone toward it. It slowly sucks them all into the building and then the hatch closes behind them. For a second everything’s dark, but then a light goes on and the water drains out of the room very, very quickly, because that’s where they are, in a little room like they have in submarines—an airlock?—and in just a few seconds all of the water’s gone.

  The mayor removes his diving mask, all smiles, and is about to make some speech, but before he can, Sertôrian pulls off her own mask and just lays into the mayor. He should have warned them about what was going to happen, and he had no right to drag them to the bottom of this lake without their permission, and what was he thinking?

  The mayor looks pretty contrite about this, as do his two assistants. The mayor says he’s mortified, just mortified. He thought it would be a nice surprise for everybody, but he can see now how maybe it wasn’t the best idea, maybe not the type of surprise that everyone would enjoy. He says he hopes Sertôrian and her crew will accept his most sincere apologies.

  This doesn’t make Sertôrian any less wary, but she can see that the best tactical move is to pretend to accept the apology. So she does, but she still insists that they return to the village immediately. The mayor says it would be a shame not to take a tour of the Aquatorium—that’s what this building’s called—before they go. Sertôrian declines the invitation. The mayor presses. It goes back and forth like that until the mayor sneers at Sertôrian and her crew, tells them there’s no point pretending anymore, and presses a button on this special wrist console he has on his suit.

  Immediately, the dive suits of Sertôrian and her crew go completely rigid. Basically they’re trapped. That’s when the mayor introduces one of his assistants as the town judge. The judge gives a solemn little bow, and then pulls this sheet of parchment from a pocket of his dive suit. He reads some official jargon about Sertôrian and her crew committing grave crimes against the village of Lakeshore, and that now, for their own good and for the good of society, they’re sentenced to life imprisonment in the Aquatorium.

  Then things get a little convoluted in the story, or maybe it just stretched my Portuguese skills too far. As I understood it, though, the mayor and his assistants—the judge and the other guy—are able to leave somehow, but Sertôrian and her crew are stuck, and then their dive gear dissolves, or is taken away, and then they’re inside the main hall of the Aquatorium with thousands of other people.

  From here we learn that the Aquatorium is essentially a gigantic underwater debtors’ prison. The people of the village have very strong feelings about self-sufficiency, or whatever you want to call it, so anyone who can’t pay off their debts is cast out of town and sent to live at the bottom of the lake. That’s why Sertôrian and her crew are there, because basically they just showed up on the planet and asked for a handout. Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. Salgado-MacKenzie spends eight pages explaining the philosophical underpinnings of the law, as well as its nuanced applications. In a nutshell, though, the Aquatorium is a debtors’ prison.

  The story picks right back up as it follows Sertôrian and her crew through their first few weeks in the Aquatorium. Navigating prison life requires every skill they’ve developed during the war and their subsequent years of imperiled wandering. The Aquatorium is surprisingly brutal for a debtors’ prison, thanks in large part to the guards. They treat their charges with unrelenting cruelty, devising malevolent schemes to exploit existing rivalries between the inmates—rivalries that, thanks in part to these machinations, often erupt in violence. Within this turbulent environment, the shipmates are constantly having to prove themselves in bloody one-on-one fights that happen whenever the guards deliberately turn a blind eye. However, all of the shipmates, and Sertôrian especially, successfully strike a balance between being tough but not malicious, and eventually they win the respect of their fellow prisoners.

  Their closest ally is a woman named Vera, who has attempted twenty-three separate escapes from the Aquatorium. She’s kept in solitary confinement most of the time because of this, but Sertôrian’s chief technician rigs up a way for Vera to communicate with them, and together they plan a daring prison break that will free everyone inside the Aquatorium.

  Their escape plan relies on a crucial piece of intelligence: On her most recent attempt, Vera could have gotten away but instead chose to break into the warden’s office because of a rumor she’d heard from the Aquatorium’s most senior inmate just before he’d died. He’d told Vera that plans existed to safely evacuate the warden and all of the guards in case of emergency. He wasn’t sure how, exactly, but if Vera could find out, she could use the plans to escape with a large number of her fellow inmates.

  Sure enough, when Vera broke into the warden’s office and cracked his safe, she found protocols and technical directions for turning the Aquatorium’s recreation hall into a massive, temporary submarine that would safely carry its occupants to the surface. Elated, Vera committed the plans to memory, returned them to the safe, and then, to cover her tracks, deliberately got caught by a guard on the opposite end of the Aquatorium.

  With this submarine evacuation capability in mind, then, Vera and Captain Sertôrian plan the prison break. One part of their escape team will draw the guards away from the recreation hall. Another will disable the locking mechanism that keeps all the individual cells closed. Another will guide all their fellow inmates to the recreation hall. And another will make the necessary technical preparations for the recreation hall to become an escape submarine.

  The prison break itself goes better than any of them could have expected. In the cafeteria, Vera starts a small fire that temporarily distracts the guards, and from there everything runs like clockwork. The prisoners are freed from their cells. The guards are drawn out of the recreation hall, which is then filled with all the prisoners. Sertôrian’s chief technician throws a lever. The wing seals itself off from the rest of the prison. An engine whirs to life and the vessel rises.

  Inside the submarine, there’s cheering, hugging, and tears. Everyone thrills at the prospect of seeing daylight again, of being able to move about freely. For a few minutes, the recreation hall is one big happy party.

  When they reach the surface, though, the real trouble begins. Turns out, the warden and the guards were able to send word to the mayor about the prison break via a secret emergency radio, so when Vera, Sertôrian and her crew, and all the other prisoners finally make it to shore, the mayor and most of the village are waiting with heavy artillery.

  It gets pretty ugly. They just start mowing down the prisoners, no questions asked. Bodies pile up, blood in the water, the works. The prisoners do have some makeshift weapons of their own, though, and there are so many of them that even though the casualties are severe, they manage to overwhelm
the forces of the mayor eventually. They take control of the heavy artillery and, in turn, the village.

  Things get more complicated from there as the former occupants of the Aquatorium disagree about how to proceed. Some of the people want to execute every last villager on the spot. Others, led by Vera, argue for a more temperate approach, at least for the time being—a resettlement elsewhere on the planet, maybe, or even a peaceful reintegration. By this point, Sertôrian and her crew have extricated themselves from the core of the action and are just waiting for the first opportunity to make a break for their ship. They’ve seen this kind of thing before, but that doesn’t make it any easier to watch.

  As the debate among the former prisoners heats up, the shipmates slip away. There’s this moment just as they’re leaving when Sertôrian catches Vera’s eye, wanting to silently thank her for helping them escape the Aquatorium, and Vera looks back at her from the midst of this debate that’s only getting uglier, and just looks completely overwhelmed, kind of defeated. Sertôrian turns away, and then she and her crew are off. They’re boarding their spaceship when they hear renewed gunfire back in the village. Then they take off and that’s it.

  IV

  What I’m about to show you,” said Sérgio, “has remained hidden from the eyes of the world for many, many years. Only a select and worthy few have ever laid eyes on this document, and you, Daniel Laszlo, having passed your initiatory trial, will now join that select fellowship.”

  I was back in Sérgio’s office, my plans for the day having taken another unexpected turn. I’d been so engrossed in the Salgado-MacKenzie story that, without noticing, I’d ridden the train all the way to the end of the line and then back to the same station I’d started from just a few blocks from the library.

  After apologizing to Sérgio for lying to him that morning, I’d told him what had just happened with the story—that it had drawn me in so completely that I’d lost track of my physical existence in the world.

  “Very good,” Sérgio had said. “Very good. I think you’re ready now to hear the portions of my story that I withheld from you yesterday.”

  We’d then walked down to his office, where he’d removed a yellowing, business-sized envelope from a secret pocket on the inner wall of the filing cabinet.

  Sérgio now held that envelope upright at the front edge of his desk.

  “I wish I could tell you, Daniel,” he said, “that the reason nobody else has seen this document is because a sinister cabal—the Illuminati, maybe, or the Rosicrucians—has worked for decades to suppress it, and that I only obtained it myself by deciphering a series of obscure clues I found concealed within the world’s most treasured works of art, clues that led me to a labyrinthine archive below a centuries-old cathedral, where I snatched this document from its malevolent keepers at great risk to my own life.

  “But the truth is, I found this document in a box of garbage, and nobody else knows about it because nobody else cares.”

  He set the letter flat on his desk and raised his hands in a gesture of rhetorical surrender.

  “Nevertheless,” he went on, standing the envelope back up on its edge. “I would ask you, are the forces of indifference any less sinister than those of hooded cultists bound together by arcane oaths to uphold ancient and bloody agendas? I would say no, mainly because I don’t believe these secret cabals really exist. Indifference, though, is all too real. Indifference snuffs out idealism and enables tyrants. Indifference consigns millions of fascinating men and women to the dustbin of history. Indifference swallows people like you and me into its gaping maw, never to release us. That’s what we’re fighting against here, Daniel.”

  He waved the envelope at me.

  • • •

  The story of how I got my hands on this document (said Sérgio) picks up where yesterday’s story left off. My unexpected meeting with Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie really rattled me, prompting some intense soul-searching, as you can probably imagine. It also kicked off a four-year rough patch in my life. First, I lost my job because my editor was under government pressure to kill a story I was working on, and I wouldn’t give in. This wasn’t the Trabalhador—I’d moved on from there. I’d rather not say which paper it was because the editor’s still around, and I don’t really blame him for what he did, because those were complicated times. The upshot, though, was that I lost my job and became very disillusioned with journalism.

  I told you that I’d moved on from the Trabalhador? I’d been fired there too, actually. I shouldn’t obscure that fact. Office politics of a very different variety in that case. Anyway, I was sick of all that and ready for a career change, and maybe I could have found work at another paper, or maybe not, but I decided I wasn’t interested.

  I also got divorced around this same time, after being married for just fifteen months. Her name was Dina, and she was a theater critic for one of the big newspapers. A really terrific woman. I don’t know. I don’t really want to go through all the details again, or my theories of what went wrong. Things did go wrong, though. We both made mistakes and treated each other poorly, just shabbily, and were both devastated when it got to the point when we realized that neither of us could stand the sight of the other anymore. We wanted it to work, you see. And we thought it would, but it didn’t.

  During all this time, I was also trying—and failing—to track down Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie. The morning after that party, I called everyone I knew who’d been there. None of them knew Salgado-MacKenzie. I called the organizers of the convention, hoping he’d been a registered attendee, but no such luck. I wanted so badly to speak to him again, to apologize or try to work out what had actually happened between us. I wrote a long letter to the old post office box address I had, but he never wrote back. I wasn’t even sure if the box still belonged to him.

  Well, eventually I found a new job, albeit a temporary one. An old friend from the Trabalhador put me in touch with an extravagantly wealthy steel baron who was looking for someone with good research skills and a familiarity with pulp magazines. Agreeing that I certainly fit the bill, the steel baron and I arranged a meeting, and over caipirinhas at his glass-and-metal beach house, the man explained to me that he collected vintage literary erotica. To his knowledge, he had one of the finest collections in the world. A recent uptick in business, though, had left him short on time to pursue this hobby, and the thought of all the books and magazines that he wasn’t collecting, that were simply moldering in storage rooms and used bookstores, was driving him a little crazy. Erotica, he explained, was such a fleeting genre. By and large, libraries, museums, and other archives expended scandalously little effort to preserve such publications, and if he and other like-minded individuals didn’t collect the books and magazines themselves, they would be lost to humanity forever, doomed to rot in landfills or burn in garbage fires.

  He said he understood his hobby might seem strange to me. I told him it didn’t—not at all. I explained my lifelong interest in the work of Salgado-MacKenzie and the similar frustrations I’d encountered as I’d searched for his work in the highly disposable medium of the pulps. Thrilled that I understood, the steel baron hired me on the spot as his official acquisitions agent. He gave me a handwritten list of titles he hoped to obtain, and I set to work.

  I enjoyed the job, although it ended up being very short-lived. My employer quickly realized that 80 percent of the joy he’d taken in his hobby had come from the thrill of the hunt, and to farm that part of the process out was to deprive himself of great pleasure.

  Still, while the job lasted I was very good at it. I knew all the best places to look for old, disreputable magazines and cheap anthologies. Most pulp presses trafficked in multiple unsavory genres—science fiction, true crime, horror, erotica—so many of the contacts I’d developed in the publishing world during my decades-long quest for the works of Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie were able to point me toward the obscure titles that my employer wished t
o acquire.

  I was also fascinated by the stories themselves. While many of them utilized hackneyed premises involving nurses, schoolteachers, and libidinous dukes, some of the more obscure stories featured scenarios as novel and elaborate as anything I’d ever encountered. I read stories featuring telekinetic nipples and lie-detecting scrotums. I read stories of nude astral projection, of invisible orgies held in empty deserts, of shape-shifting lovers alternately confounding and fulfilling their partners’ desires with their ever-mutating forms. I read about yodeling vaginas and penises turned to gold. I read an erotic homage to Borges entitled, “The Erogenous Library of Babel,” in which an infinite ziggurat contains a living catalog of every sex act that could ever be imagined. Each piece in the catalog embodies a steamy (or in a few cases, very, very cold) coupling (or tripling, or quadrupling, and so on) of wildly ecstatic participants. These carnal tableaux are curated by a rigorously trained order of scholars, whose understanding of human lust, over time, reaches divine, transcendent heights.

  These stories explored territories of the human imagination I never knew to be so vast, so intriguing, or so delightful.

  As I said, the job didn’t last long, but the experience proved invaluable to me for two key reasons. The first was that it led me to my current vocation as a librarian, a career I’ve found far more satisfying and suited to my talents than journalism.

  The second is this envelope, which I stumbled upon completely by accident. A few weeks after I accepted the gig with the steel baron, I got a call from a publishing friend who wanted to let me know that the owner of Venus House, a small press that had specialized in pulp anthologies—erotica, mainly, as well as some science fiction—had just died. Apparently, the man had kept in the second bedroom of his apartment a copy of every book he’d ever published, and this weekend his nephew would be auctioning it all off to whoever was interested. I thanked my friend for the tip, and immediately informed the steel baron.