Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “But,” the bird said. “But—but—we’re friends with the Super Ultra Duchess of the Fedora Forest! She has a great army and immense power. She’ll be mega pissed if you kill our friend here. She’ll probably hunt you down and make an example of you.”

  “What?” the dog said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  The sausage was about to say the exact same thing as the dog. But when she glanced at the bird, he rolled his eyes and poked forward with his beak, as if to say, Just work with me here.

  So the sausage chimed in. “Yes! The Super Ultra Duchess. You didn’t even know this forest had its own ruler, did you? And we’re under her protection. She’s so powerful, even the Confederacy leaves her alone.”

  “I’ve never heard of any Super Ultra Duchess,” the dog grumbled, “and I’m on all the message boards.”

  “Well, you obviously don’t come to the Fedora Forest too often,” the sausage said huffily.

  “In fact,” said the bird, “I think I saw her just a little while ago.” He was gesturing at someone whom the sausage couldn’t see, and she realized that their friend, the mouse, must be someplace nearby. The bird kept talking, trying to stall the dog. “She makes all the rules hereabouts, and in fact, you better watch out, because I think you’re violating a bunch of her regulations and ordinances and statutes. For reals.”

  “I don’t know.” The dog sniffed the air. “I think I would have smelled it if there was any such authority around here. Authority has a very distinct scent.”

  “I’m pretty sure she’s right around here,” the bird said, looking around in a panic.

  “This is your last warning,” the sausage said, with zero conviction.

  “Nah,” the dog said. “I think I’m going to eat this sausage now, and then there won’t be any evidence left anyway.”

  He bent his head to scoop the sausage up in his jaws, ready to gobble her up once and for all.

  “WHO DARES?” came a thundering voice through the forest.

  The dog dropped the sausage, his tail going between his legs by some instinct.

  “UNMOUTH MY SUBJECT,” said the voice. And the source of the voice came close enough for the sausage to see. It was the mouse, riding on top of the sausage’s mobile DJ rig, using the microphone on its highest reverb setting. The mouse had found a big mushroom, which she was using as a hat, and had covered herself and the DJ rig with a big velvety red blanket.

  “Hey,” the dog said, with a bit of a whimper in his voice. “I found her. She had forged papers. She’s free booty, man.”

  “YOURS IS THE BOOTY THAT WILL BE FREE,” said the mouse, “IF YOU MOLEST MY SUBJECT. GO NOW! BEFORE I BRING MY MIGHTY ARMIES DOWN UPON YOU.”

  The dog hesitated one moment longer, but the mouse bellowed, “GO!” He turned his lowered tail and ran off into the forest with his legs flailing. The sausage was so amazed and relieved, she fell on her back, wobbling as if she was being grilled.

  “That was a near thing,” the sausage said.

  “That dog will be back, I bet,” said the mouse, disentangling herself from the DJ rig, the mushroom, and the blanket.

  “We’ll just have to make the Super Ultra Duchess more convincing next time,” said the bird. “We’ll all have to work together on it, since she’s like our insurance policy.”

  “Ow.” The mouse cringed as it exposed its patchy fur to the open air. “I am actually in pain, all over my whole body. I tried to get into the hot frying pan to season the food with my body, and my fur did not like it at all. That’s why I was here in the woods when that dog attacked you. I came here to ask you for advice on what I was doing wrong. I burned my poor feet, so I had to ride here on your DJ rig, and it’s lucky that I did, too.”

  “There’s a whole art to wriggling around in a frying pan and seasoning it with your body,” the sausage said, still expanding with relief.

  “Really?” the mouse said.

  “No, not really,” the sausage said, with an exasperated laugh. “You just have to be a sausage, dude.”

  “Oh,” the bird said. “That actually makes total sense.”

  After that, they carried on more or less as they had before. Except that now, they had a house meeting once a week or so, just to make sure they were all happy with the arrangement of the jobs. Some days, the bird skipped fetching wood and went flying off to look for cool stuff that they could sell to the scrap merchants in town. The sausage’s DJ gigs started bringing in enough money that they could hire some part-time help. The mouse got better at pretending to be a Super Ultra Duchess, until they finally received an embossed invitation to join the Confederacy. They framed the invite and put it on the mantelpiece, over their PlayStation’s big screen.

  “It just proves,” said the bird, who would not stop extolling his own cleverness for a minute, “anybody can be a big deal, if they just have a posse.”

  “Yeah,” the mouse said, curling up between her friends. “It just makes me wonder. Why doesn’t everybody just invent their own nation?”

  “I think maybe they do,” said the sausage. They were playing a side-scrolling shooter, and the sausage had just gotten to the Final Boss, so nobody talked for a while after that. Until it was time to climb into the frying pan and make dinner.

  Margot and Rosalind

  1. She was warned.

  The doorbell rings as she’s giving the brain its nutrient bath. The Hyperbrain likes it when she scritches behind its temporal lobe, like a cat—if a cat was a biomimetic neural network that filled up your entire basement. Margot whispers stories about heroes to the Hyperbrain, which likes Rosalind Franklin best.

  Margot changes as she walks along the hall of her creaky rowhouse, lined with photos of dead people: her wife Sukey, other lovers, all worry-smiling. By the time Margot reaches her door, she’s playing up her non-threatening slouch and the way she favors one leg.

  The man from the Brain Brigade looks uncomfortable to be in the Lowdown, talking to someone like Margot. “Ma’am. Miss. Ms. Baxter,” he says. “We’ve had reports of an unlicensed A.I., in contravention of 37 use cases.”

  She glances past him, upward, at the place he comes from. Crystal skyways cris-cross, rippling with light. Above it all dwell the Immortals, playing their Wall games. Occasionally a gamepiece falls and blocks the street down here. Everyone’s GPS just re-routes around the obstruction.

  The man talks for ages, but has no warrant. Margot keeps saying, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re speaking about,” but doesn’t let him inside.

  2. She was given an explanation.

  The brain, which Margot has taken to calling Rosalind, already knows everything and predicts the weather years from now. But Rosalind still purrs louder whenever Margot tells stories of people who stood up for truth. Borrowing those seeds was the best decision Margot ever made.

  The Brain Brigade keeps sending notices, which float outside, singing the legal code to the tune of a Bach fugue. She drowns them out with some good zydeco. Pale, fragile men shiver on her welcome mat. She stopped answering the door.

  Then an ice sculpture comes from Margot’s refrigerator. A bull of a man, with a cunning smile. The statue looks around and raises a frozen hat.

  “Ms. Baxter, my name is Arthur. I run the Brain Brigade. I must counsel you: An uncontrolled Hyperbrain could cause unimaginable chaos. Most of all, under no circumstance should you attempt to connect your own mind to your illicit Hyperbrain.”

  “Ha,” Margot says. “That’s reserved for the Immortals up top, is it?”

  “Actually,” the figurine says, “no. None of the Immortals has connected to their own Hyperbrain in over a century. The Hyperbrains engineer wealth and eternal youth for people, and we leave them to it.”

  “You have the most advanced consciousnesses in creation,” Margot almost spills hot tea on herself. “And. . . you don’t even use them to think?”

  The iceman laughs, not entirely at Margot. “Believe me, there’s nothing worse than being
both immortal and intelligent. Imagine the boredom! Plus you start to ask questions, and the worst thing about questions is that sometimes, they have answers.”

  The statue melts, leaving a wet mess on her parquet.

  3. Nevertheless, she persisted.

  Every network airdrops a reporter onto Margot’s lawn, and they intone that Margot is destroying the fabric of society. Why does Margot hate ordinary people? What gives her the right to be better than everybody else? A salt-of-the-Earth man named Jeff the Chair Maker has built a chair that bursts into flames every five minutes. All the reporters want Jeff to shout at them on camera. The police wear riot gear to hold back the mob. Men and women in white spacesuits prepare to breach Margot’s house, but they’re alarmed by Jeff’s self-immolating chair.

  Margot’s toaster makes toast with Arthur’s mustachioed face on it. “Ms. Baxter. I must counsel you. Nobody knows what might happen if a human tried to think using a Hyperbrain. The consequences—”

  The pounding at Margot’s door sounds like a stampede.

  Rosalind’s purring sounds different, like it’s time. Knowledge is justice, the rumbling seems to say. Margot reaches for her brain-interface, which looks like a diamond colander, and lowers it onto her own crown. This Singularity will be most singular, she thinks, and then her mind opens wide.

  Ghost Champagne

  1. Comedy

  You know what I wish? I wish I could just reach into someone’s chest and pull out their beating heart and show it to them, like a movie villain. (And then I would put it back and their chest would seal up and they would be fine. I’m not a monster!) But imagine how great that would be, whenever the endless string of entitled assclowns start screwing with you—just reach in, and ZOOOOOOOP! Oh, what’s this? It’s your heart. In my hand! You wanna say something now, huh? I didn’t think so. I mean, I would only use this power in extreme circumstances, like when one of the developers in my day job starts mansplaining to me, or when I’m super bored in a meeting. Speaking of which, why is it OK to text in a meeting but not to play Candy Crush? That’s discrimination.

  My comedy set is off to a pretty good start, and then I notice my ghost at a third row table, right between the canoodling pierced hipsters and the drunken yuppies.

  Some days I hardly notice my ghost, but lately she’s in my face a whole lot more. Today she’s wearing a lacy loligoth dress that I wish I owned in real life, and a little hat over her wavy dark hair, which is a little shorter than mine. She’s drinking a Sidecar or an Old Fashioned, because yeah, even ghosts must obey the two–drink–minimum rule at Sal’s Comedy Cellar, and she watches me go through my set with the usual disaffected look on her face, like been–there–done–that–and–died.

  I do what I always do: ignore her. Even when she knocks the candle off her table and turns the floor into a minefield of broken glass and hot wax. Fuck her. Remember the toolkit. Keep going, look past her—I try to gaze instead at my boyfriend Raj, sitting on a stool in the back. The ghost doesn’t matter. She had her chance to be alive, she obviously blew it.

  We’ve reached the butt–jokes section of my set. (Dick jokes are for lesser intellects, but butt jokes are sophisticated and brilliant.) And then, Raj gets up and walks upstairs with the rest of the comics, right when I’m getting to the part about how my man has a big butt, and why is there no female equivalent of an ass man? (Nobody ever says ass woman, which just sounds like the worst superheroine ever.) Raj just up and walks out on me. I see my ghost out of the corner of my eye, giving me a look like, What can you do?

  I stumble through my set, but the energy is all gone. And I don’t even get any love for my spiel about how Japanese toilets are so great, with the heated seats and the jets of warm water, it’s like being rimmed by pixies—I sat on one and my butt finally forgave me for the horseback–riding lessons I took when I was twelve. My ghost gets so bored, she knocks over someone’s beer glass with the back of her hand, CRASH. The crowd is a goddamn humor sponge. Fuck all of these stupid people, why do they pay $15 just to zonk out in public, when they could stay home and watch the Homophobia Channel for free?

  When I get upstairs to the sidewalk after my set, Raj and the other comedians, mostly dudes, are standing out front smoking. Even though Raj doesn’t smoke. It’s a cool dry night. They nod at me, and then start talking about how Raj and I should have kids. You should have kids so you can enter the America’s Funniest Mom competition, you would crush that, says Roddy, who’s basically just a pair of sideburns in search of a face. You should have kids so you can get some fashion cred, cuz you know, kids are the perfect accessories, says the bleach–blond sunburnt Campbell. We should have kids so I can be a stay–at–home dad instead of just unemployable, says Raj, choking a little on his cig. If you had kids, you could get a sick reality TV show on public access cable, with your crazy family and shit, Roddy says. I realize that Raj put them up to this, he asked them to broach the idea of having kids, and this is the way they’ve chosen to go about it.

  I just roll my eyes and walk away, heading down Bleecker towards the F. I’m not going to sit through the rest of the night waiting for Raj’s set after this shitshow. My ghost slouches on the other side of the street, loitering outside the CVS and the fetish boutique. She gives me a friendly wave and I ignore her.

  She didn’t laugh once during my comedy set, but now my ghost looks at me, sees my angry tears, and laughs. Ruefully, which goes with the territory, I guess.

  I forget the toolkit for once, and just stare at her. As if this time, there might be some clue. Just like always, my ghost looks exactly like me, except older. And dead. She has the tilde–shaped scar on her chin, that I got rock–climbing when I was 19 (and she had it before I did.) She’s gazing into the fetish shop, through the aluminum shutters.

  2. Authority

  Why is my own ghost haunting me, anyway? Do I die in the future, and decide that instead of going to whatever afterlife a shitty comedian, lapsed Evangelical, and unfulfilled techie goes to, I’d rather go back in time and haunt my own living self? Is this a curse? A punishment for some mistake I don’t know I’ve made, or maybe will make? Most of all, why is my ghost such a bitch?

  I went to every stupid medium and spiritualist, and got a big goose egg. I went into therapy and my therapist just wanted to give me pills to make me stop seeing the ghost—but as soon as Dr. Jane reached for her prescription pad, my ghost went Full Poltergeist. She started in with the diplomas on the walls, and then got into the dolls and the office computer, and finally the antique furniture. Dr. Jane’s classy office turned into a tweaker’s love nest. Dr. Jane couldn’t stop hyperventilating, until I held her like a colicky baby for like ten minutes.

  Whatever. I stopped worrying about the ghost, since she mostly minds her own business, and I’ve got a life to live. Trust the toolkit. Trust the toolkit.

  Raj grovels for three days and I finally sort of forgive his ass. He’s the sweetest guy when we’re not around other comedians. Which, we’re both trying to break into comedy, so.

  I get mad all over again when Raj gets invited to be in a fancy comedy showcase the following week and I’m somehow skipped over. But Raj gives me a dozen foot–rubs and cleans the bathroom, and offers to help me shop for a wedding present for my mom. What do you get your mom when she’s marrying a woman the exact same age as you? (Seriously, what?)

  But. I notice that when I find out about being left out of the big comedy show, which is headlined by a B–list comedian whose set is basically listing Star Wars toys he used to own, my ghost seems to get a little less transparent. I can make out the tiny lines on her/my face more clearly. She’s perched on the wooden stool by the kitchen–counter of the teeny one–bedroom that Raj and I share in Green Point, and she’s holding a mug of chai that smells of cinnamon and seaweed. I notice she’s got her ears double–pierced, whereas mine are just single–pierced.

  Raj notices I’m staring into space and asks what’s up. He’s got big friendly eyes and a
wide pouty mouth, and hair like a single blue flame. He touches my left palm with his right index finger and I kind of melt. I tell him nothing’s up, I’m just thinking about the big presentation at work which, since we’re both living off my income, is kind of a thing. He kisses me—hot butterflies!—and tells me to knock ‘em dead.

  My ghost has a seat in the back of the conference room for my presentation, where I yak about some of the challenges in our next code push. I mostly love being a project manager, except my company keeps changing its business model. This month, we’re making an app to help people use their Spotify playlists to get laid, I am not even kidding. It’s called Remixr. I’m doing a pretty solid job of talking through the workflow issues we’ve been having. Except one of the coders named Mickey keeps engaging in microaggresions: spreading his legs real wide in his chair, throwing paper balls at the trash right next to where I’m standing (his aim sucks), and yawn–laughing while I’m talking. Everyone else is just bored, probably playing Candy Crush under the chrome table.

  Over by the window, my ghost is staring out at the Shake Shack across the street, as if she could really go for an extra–large chocolate shake and fries right now. She’s wearing sweatpants in a professional office setting. Her expression plainly says that being a ghost has certain perks and giving zero fucks about stupid product meetings is one of them.

  I breathe and look away from the ghost, but I keep snagging her in my peripheral vision. The thought that’s always in the back of my mind surges forward: You’re going to lose your mind, it’s in the cards. The corner of my eye has become my whole field of vision, putting my ghost front and center. I start mumbling and repeating myself until the bun–haired VP of product, Marcia, thanks me for my efforts and says we should move on.

  In my dreams, I’m a semi–famous turbo–geek who rocks the comedy scene every night. I have this fantasy of going to some city to give a TEDx talk, where I somehow make everybody laugh and rethink their whole way of looking at everything, and then since I’m already in town, I might as well just go perform at the local comedy spot that’s been begging me to show up. I actually enjoy the whole process of making things happen, helping code come together, and putting out products that enrich people’s lives. (Even when it’s something like Remixr.) I like the problem–solving, and I feel like I’m good at making smart people pull their heads out of their butts. Usually.