At the Edge

by Lee Murray

  IF only you could put your body back together like a puzzle, make everything function at full capacity. Those pieces of you that slough off every morning must have collected some good chunks of raw data by now. They’re everywhere, never in the same place as you, searching for their own truth, oblivious to any other of your selves.

  You hope they find what you’re looking for. You would like to make a useful observation one of these days other than the shell looking like a closing eyelid.

  Choosing the right spot to die takes calculation, good timing, and the precise angle of the bars of sunset through that eyelid with its star-less greed.

  Luckily, no South Island coastal edge is more than eight or nine hours drive from Christchurch, giving you plenty of time to walk out further. Marfells Beach, Punakaiki, Bruce Bay. Even the sandflies know what’s up and hang in sad little clouds of welcome. It’s not cockroaches that survive the end of the world, it’s the blood suckers. They’ve tasted everything. It’s in their DNA now.

  Farewell Spit is always a nice choice, though it doesn’t give the perfect angle. It’s the golden sand, the hesitant blue of the water as it reluctantly leeches away to grey, to the liquid obsidian knife edge cutting the world open along its ley lines.

  Yes, you know you’re holding on to humanity with too firm a grip. There’s nothing left to do. The choice was taken away from you. You wanted to go. The Collective in their strange suits said, ‘Go, collect what is important to you. We have time. We’ll wait.’

  They lied.

  It’s a mistake you don’t intend to make again.

  If there are places devoid of data, it’s the evac zones. The centre of everything until they were violently, silently not. You watch yourself run back to your seventh-floor apartment on Victoria Street to fill hard drives, flash sticks, e-readers with science texts. Had the Collective uploaded the world’s entire digital store of knowledge to their great library ships? There had been so little time, mere weeks, and humans had to compete for space with thousands of other Ascended species. How useful would all that information be, once they’d gone post?

  You ran back to the park, not that far away. And you shouted wait, wait, but that final evac pod had gone without you. Within moments Christchurch was all quiet. Not even the sagging oaks and willows, hugging their branches about themselves along the Avon, murmured farewell.

  You stood for hours staring at the shrinking silver hole in the sky. There was no use screaming come back. Screaming is so pointless.

  The silver star got small impossibly quick, as if they knew what they had done.

  Oh yes, you firmly believe this is an experiment. The Collective’s arrival was too damn convenient. No time, just go. No use sullying the monster with romance. This world-eater was bigger, hungrier, more random than them. Here is the way home, they said, pointing away from one darkness into another. At least, there were stars in their direction. A faction of the Collective could not abide unpredictability; you agree on the specious concepts of luck and coincidence. Everything is quantifiable, even if the answer isn’t immediately obvious.

  The Dark must really annoy them, then.

  And now … the silver finally winks out. You know the damage their backwash does as it swarms over the planet, over you. It takes energy to retreat from death that fast. The Collective hadn’t been entirely forthcoming about many things. But there was no looking a gift escape in the eye. Maybe that backwash is what triggered these months of Sundays. Maybe that’s what they intended.

  Data, dammit. Too many variables, too many holes. Solve for x.

  Here’s a variable: are there more like you, left to collect data? Not the pieces of you, but others wandering other countries, watching parts of themselves fall off. It seems likely, but only you and yours are what remain on the South Island of New Zealand. There are no ways to contact the rest of the world, they made damn sure of that. They vacuumed the vacuum. No satellites, no stations, no junk. The night is the clearest you’ve ever seen. Convenient.

  The great eye is getting real tired now. The southerly has shuddered to a halt, and the sand rubs listless at your feet. These are just emotions, clouding observational facts. Turn your back on the east. You don’t desire to mourn yet another sunrise, but desire has nothing to do with it.

  Watch out. Here it comes.

  It’s the same as always.

  A last tui tolls a death knell from the sweet-salt-smelling bush, but is cut short.

  Good night. Die well. You’ll see everything in the morning anyway.

  *

  Three Lands.

  Aeron is watching the last sunset bury itself into the Earth. Again.

  There is no choice about looking death dead in the eye. It is what it is.

  Aeron m’boy, people would say, you hate that phrase. You’re always the master of your destiny.

  Now they don’t say anything. They chose to abandon this land for new ones carved out of asteroids by the Collective, persisting with the new plate tectonics of this universe.

  Picking a spot to die every day takes careful consideration, good map reading, and careful driving. He doesn’t want to die before he has to, before he’s saluted every last rock that he can. No GPS now all the satellites are gone. Riding the backbone of Te Waipounamu gives the best view: Mount Cook, Arthur’s Pass, Cardrona. Everywhere below and beyond is crimson-flecked white wave tops, the grinding rock tide of the Kaikouras and the Southern Alps. Throwing pebbles from that high up won’t start an avalanche.

  Today, regrets fall one by one into the valleys below the Island Saddle.

  But he shouldn’t be able to see all the way down like this. He can’t quite shake the feeling he’s standing on someone’s shoulders, watching the walls from all angles as they crumble.

  It must be those pieces of him that chip off like shale beneath a chisel every morning. These rolling stones must be a side effect of what’s happening to the planet in its death throes. An attempt at species repopulation in spite of the harsh climes. Too late, too soon.

  He can’t hold the land together with just his hands and willpower. It would take an intervention of god-like proportions to stop the Earth being encased by the Dark. And the gods that did a drive-by were out of time and ideas.

  Just when humans had crawled out from under the delusion that they were special to the universe, they get a mere few weeks, a whisper, a glance, of undivided attention from the parental unit. Then they’re thrown to the dogs of vastness again.

  The gods looked away.

  This, whatever this becomes, would require new gods. Or none at all. Hands were just as good at shaping clay.

  Had enough about Earth geography been uplifted to the Collective’s great data storage ships? Many didn’t think information about a soon-to-be-dead planet would be relevant. Humans had barely scratched the surface. The Collective were experts by millennia of default.

  If they ever wanted a hope of putting the puzzle pieces of Earth back together, they were going to need atlases and textbooks. So that had been his task in those weeks locked away in his tidy 4-bed 2-bath in flat-land suburbia. Sorting and choosing relevance. The weeks of civility and resignation gave no sense of urgency. Why riot and loot, hurt and maim, when you can’t take it with you, when borders were moot?

  By the time he decided he was prepared, the last shuttle was clawing a hole in the sky, the evac zone in Hagley Park scorched and empty. He’d stood there for the longest time, shaking a fistful of flash drives, shouting wait, you forgot these…

  Maps. Desire lines. The best and quickest routes. Linkages. Drawing a line from there to here. These are what he’s good at. And by god, if that’s all he’s got left, he’ll etch them on his skin with needle and blood if he has to. What else is going to survive the forever night as the shell closes its eye on the world? Paper will burn. A signal will degrade the further it travels. There’ll on
ly be his skin left, those pieces of him stretched across the continental plates, stitching the Earth together until someone comes to scrape the palimpsest clean and start anew. He is cartographer, witness, bacteria, thief.

  He examines his hands, the ones that can’t pull up the anchor of Maui to let the waka float away into the milky stars. There must be something in this DNA, the random collection of wrinkles and calluses, lifelines and scars that have moored him so securely to this land. Maybe just the right amount of nothing, maybe just the right amount of skin. There’s certainly plenty of him to go around, if the dust on the floor every morning is anything to go by.

  And now: the sunset, with its encore of darkness. It gets cold very quickly this far up once the shroud smothers his face. There is no worry of freezing to death. Every last moment counts, etched into his flesh by near-invisible dust particles attracted early to the inside of the shell. At that speed, the dust looks like anti-meteorites, stars pummelling at the nearby heaven in a futile gesture to embrace their siblings.

  He blinks, and for just a moment the three islands have joined hands. He’s so large, he could step from one mountain top to another, across the Cook Strait and keep on going, striding over the Pacific to batter his fists against the walls of other continents. And then he is small again, with a perfect view down to the west. If he can see to the coast on a night like this, death is worth it.

  He imagines approaching the planet like one would a map, two dimensions curved by the hands of gods upon and over. Is this how the Collective saw him, clinging to the top of the bottom of the world?

  He thinks of all the names for this place – the ones before, the ones now – and tries to imagine what those names would become after.

  What names did the Collective have for their places, solid and in-between, before they too were eaten by the Dark? He knuckles his eyes. The skin stretches aching across his bones, washed clean. There is no use for a name when there is nothing to attach it to. ‘You Are Here’.

  The atmosphere shudders as the silent lullaby sweeps it clean. The Earth is tired. Soon it will be too hard to breathe.

  He counts every vertebra of the alps, the peninsulas dipping their dragon heads into the sea. He is the master of their destiny, at the end of it. He etches their names into his skin with his teeth and fingernails, a gift to his descendants.

  The great red eye looks away.

  Good night. Die well. Please don’t be there in the morning.

  *

  Many.

  Here we are. The last sunset on Earth.

  Time to pull the sky from the sky.

  We drift down the gravel road towards the Curio Bay camp in ones and twos, Aeron pretending to be oblivious of the other Aerons. We are full of sunsets and skies, rocks and bones, carbon and oxygen and nitrogen. We have left our stardust on everything.

  The salt-rusted caravans hunch, prepared for the bitter southerly; it’s the bitter end they’re getting instead. Trees stretch their branches, ready for a farewell embrace.

  We stare over the Southern Ocean, the cliffs falling at our feet. Eyes strain, waiting for that first glimpse of onrushing death. The sky, its copper tang sweet on our tongue, weeps blood.

  The great eyelid droops. It winks. And winks again. The silver hole diminishes, but is not gone. It is a needle. We, the thread.

  This is not how this day of days goes.

  A light brush on the shoulder, like a hand resting there, soothing. Some of us stand close. Others still dot the far edges of our vision, imprinting those last images and impressions. Everything matters, and nothing.

  The inside of our elbow itches still, like all the raw places on our skin before. Eczema. Pieces of us still wanting to flake off, go wherever they please. Road markers. Souvenirs. Reminders. Maps. Memento mori.

  To what purpose?

  This.

  We beckon each other closer. Tell us what we know, Aeron. What have we seen out along the barricades? We are all coming back, to clothe Aeron against the endless night. Skin upon relentless skin, our armour. We shall come together and apart, a step forward, a step back, hesitating on the lintel of death. We shall spread our knowledge along the ground and out across the convex shell that is about to become our universe.

  The Collective left us here. We are humanity in one name only. No. We are the Collective; we joined their ranks in that last moment when we made that choice, when they chose to leave us behind, when they left us here by accident. We are their eyes, their ears, their dozens of other senses, some of which we are yet to discover.

  We shall become. We are here to witness, if only for ourself. And one is enough.

  We are their experiment. They are ours. A closed system. One day they will crack open this shell and feed upon what has gestated inside, gorge themselves with millennia of good nights. And we will nourish them with what has been writ on our skin, what we imbibed of this infinite, this few dozen, this one sunset.

  We won’t be able to give of what we know of death, because of death we have not received.

  The wings of the shell are almost together, the tendrils along the edges reaching out to interlace like hungry, searching fingers. Only patches of the space beyond remain. Only moments until death.

  The familiar lethargy does not push us towards the gentle drift of sleep. We huddle closer, so many of us that our edges overlap, blurring, and we cannot tell where we begin and end.

  So it shall be.

  We hold our breath.

  Once the lungs start burning, we let it back out again.

  Nothing.

  The edges of the shell meet.

  We arch the neck back. The sky is complete, a rare treat.

  Complete, except for the new stars.

  These stars are not the purple-blue diamond scatter of the Milky Way. They are much closer, pinholes to another reality, etched on the inside of the shell. They are not constellations we recognise, but, given enough time, we hope to. Some of the stars are so close we comprehend their yellowness, their blueness, their inward gasp of black on black. The largest, the brightest, the closest, is a perfect silver.

  For the first time in the many deaths we’ve set ourself to observe, we look behind.

  They wait patiently for our instruction: What do we do in death?

  Do as you always do. Run. Hide. Observe. Wonder.

  Or do nothing, if it so pleases.

  But beyond us, more are coming. They are us, but not us; us from above and below, beyond and before. They’re a new puzzle piece, a new iteration, a re-evolution to add. Their edges shimmer ice-blue, dust-grey, oily green and purple, liquid silver in the remaining Cimmerian light.

  Their curiosity has killed them. They have come back.

  One Life, No Respawns

  Tom Dullemond

  The old jack laughed dryly when he saw the motto behind me. The sharp sound of it, his little coughs of appreciative mirth, bounced around my small office.

  ‘Man, I used to hear about you guys all the time.’

  I didn’t need to turn in my chair to look at the wall, but I did, despite the pain, just to set him at ease. I didn’t really look at it though.

  ‘They made, like, five VR shooters about you guys. That’s how they trained you, too, right? Virtual shooters? No respawns.’ He laughed like no one had ever made that joke before. ‘You’re almost like … a mascot for the recruitment agency. Company must’ve paid a fortune for the rights to use that. And you!’ He laughed again.

  I turned back to him and crinkled as much of my face as I could in a smile.

  ‘Hah, yeah. Good times, my friend, good times.’ The plastic of my cheeks felt tight, but I don’t think the jack noticed. I tapped my false nose conspiratorially. ‘Still got my one life.’

  But not my one job. I forced myself to keep the edge of frustration out of my voice. As if my screw-
up was this jack’s fault.

  You’re right, I’d said to my boss, parroting his lecture. I don’t think I’m a good fit for this organisation anymore. Vets can be pretty touchy and what I did to that guy … yeah some people can take it, but I should have known better, of course, I understand. Yeah, he’s in a frakkin’ psych ward now, I heard. So there’s that.

  I didn’t say any of that out loud. The state cut my pension again and I really couldn’t afford to lose another job, this job of ‘giving other vets jobs’. I was scraping the bottom of the office work barrel, and now I’d scraped so far I’d fallen through the bottom and what was there, in the beyond, beyond the barrel? I guess I’d find out.

  ‘So how long have you been working here?’ asked the jack.

  ‘It’s my last day, actually.’

  ‘Oh?’ The little vowel hung in the air and instead of answering it, I pushed the sheaf of e-forms and a stylus across the desk, a quiet reminder to the jack of why he was here. ‘There’s a placement on offer with a private security company. They have a pretty good psych on staff locally, and a couple of Earth-based professionals available over priority solar network links.’

  Something shifted in the jack’s eyes and I could sense that I was skating close to whatever his private hell was. Back in the corps, we were all pretty hands-on, maybe the last hands-on soldiers in the system, and I couldn’t really imagine what might break a jack. None of the ports in his neck looked damaged, but their kind of free-running through hostile computer networks came with its own horrors.

  ‘Yeah, I get a lot of chatter in here,’ he said, touching his face. His eyes were suddenly wide. There was a tremor in his voice. ‘Lot of flashbacks, you know? You mesh pretty tightly with the tech.’

  ‘No to the links, then.’ I smiled, more broadly this time. ‘That’s why they employ a local.’ I struggled to think of a real world analogue for a winky-face. That’s what that sentence needed. A stupid smiling winky-face stuck right on the end of it. I’m on your side, buddy. I’m no different to you, man, we’ve been through the same things. Wink.