I cannot take this. I blurt something, whatever, and hang up on George Henderson. I brace myself for him to call back, but he doesn’t. So I go find my wife some pants.
4.
Shary hasn’t spoken aloud in a couple of weeks now, not even anything about her game. She has less control over her bodily functions and is having “accidents” more often. I’m making her wear diapers. But her realm is massive, thriving; it’s annexed the neighboring duchies.
When I look over her shoulder, the little cats in their Renaissance Europe outfits are no longer asking her simple questions about how to tax the copper mine—instead, they’re saying things like “But if the fundamental basis of governance is derived from external symbols of legitimacy, what gives those symbols their power in the first place?”
She doesn’t tap on the screen at all, but still her answer appears somehow, as if through the power of her eye blinks: “This is why we go on quests.”
According to one of the readouts I see whisk by, Shary has forty-seven knights and assorted nobles out on quests right now, searching for various magical and religious objects as well as for rare minerals—and also for a possible passage to the West that would allow her trading vessels to avoid sailing past the Isle of Dogs.
She just hunches in her chair, frowning with her mouth, while the big cat eyes and tiny nose look playful or fierce, depending on how the light hits them. I’ve started thinking of this as her face.
I drag her away from her chair and make her take a bath, because it’s been a few days, and while she’s in there (she can still bathe herself, thank goodness), I examine the cat mask. I realize that I have no idea what is coming out of these nose plugs, even though I’ve had to refill the little reservoirs on the sides a couple times from the bottles they sent. Neurotransmitters? Pheromones? Stimulants that keep her concentrating? I really have no clue. The chemicals don’t smell of anything much.
I open my tablet and search for “divine right of cats,” plus words like “sentience,” “becoming self-aware,” or “artificial intelligence.” Soon I’m reading message boards in which people geek out about the idea that these cats are just too frickin’ smart for their own good and that they seem to be drawing something from the people they’re interfacing with. The digital cats are learning a lot, in particular, about politics and about how human societies function.
On top of which, I find a slew of economics papers—because the cats have been solving problems, inside the various iterations of Greater Felinia, that economists have struggled with in the real world. Issues of scarcity and resource allocation, questions of how to make markets more frictionless. Things I barely grasp the intricacies of, with my doctorate in art history.
And all of the really mind-blowing breakthroughs in economics have come from cat kingdoms that were being managed by people who were afflicted with Rat Catcher’s Yellows.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Shary is a prodigy; she was always the brilliant one of the two of us. Her nervous energy, her ability to get angry at dead scholars at three in the morning, the random scattering of note cards and papers all over the floor of our tiny grad-student apartment—as if the floor were an extension of her overcharged brain.
It’s been more than a week since she’s spoken my name, and meanwhile my emergency sabbatical is running out. And I can’t really afford to blow off teaching, since I’m not tenure-track or anything. I’ll have to hire someone to look after Shary, or get her into day care or a group home. She won’t know the difference between me or someone else looking after her at this point, anyway.
A couple days after my conversation with George Henderson, I look over Shary’s shoulder, and things jump out at me. All the relationship touchstones that I embedded in the game when I customized it for her are still in there, but they’ve gotten weirdly emphasized by her gameplay, like her cats spend an inordinate amount of time at the Puzzler’s Retreat. But also, she’s added new stuff. Moments I had forgotten are coming up as geological features of her Greater Felinia, hillocks and cliffs.
Shary is reliving all of the time we spent together, through the prism of these cats and their stupid politics. The time we rode bikes across Europe. The time we took up Lindy-hopping and I broke my ankle. The time I cheated on Shary and thought I got away with it, until now. The necklace she never told me she wanted that I tracked down for her. It’s all in there, woven throughout this game.
I call back George Henderson. “Okay, fine,” I say, without saying hello first. “We’ll go to your convention, tournament, whatever. Just tell us where and when.”
5.
I sort of expected that a lot of people at the “convention” would have RCY after the way George Henderson talked about the disease. But in fact it seems as though every player here has it. Either because you can’t become a power player of Divine Right without the unique mind state of people with Rat Catcher’s, or because that’s whom they were able to strong-arm into signing up.
“Here” is a tiny convention hotel in Orlando, Florida, with fuzzy bulletin boards that mention recent meetings of insurance adjusters and auto parts distributors. We’re a few miles from Disney World, but near us is nothing but strip malls and strip clubs, and one sad-looking Arby’s. We get served continental breakfast, clammy individually wrapped sandwiches, and steamer trays full of stroganoff every day.
The first day, we all mill around for an hour, with me trying to stick close to Shary on her first trip out of New Hampshire in ages. But then George Henderson (a chunky white guy with graying curly hair and an 8 Bit T-shirt) stands up at the front of the ballroom and announces that all the players are going into the adjoining ballroom, and the “friends and loved ones” will stay in here. We can see our partners and friends through an opening in the temporary wall bisecting the hotel ballroom, but they’re in their own world, sitting at long rows of tables with their cat faces on.
Those of us left in the “friends and family” room are all sorts of people, but the one thing uniting us is a pall of weariness. At least half the spouses or friends immediately announce they’re going out shopping or to Disney World. The other half mostly just sit there, watching their loved ones play, as if they’re worried someone’s going to get kidnapped.
This half of the ballroom has a sickly sweet milk smell clinging to the ornate cheap carpet and the vinyl walls. I get used to it, and then it hits me again whenever I’ve just stepped outside or gone to the bathroom.
After an hour, I risk wandering over to the “players” room and look over Shary’s shoulder. Queen Arabella is furiously negotiating trade agreements and sending threats of force to the other cat kingdoms that have become her neighbors.
Because all of the realms in this game are called “Greater Felinia” by default, Shary needed to come up with a new name for Arabella’s country. She’s renamed it “Graceland.” I stare at the name, then at Shary, who shows no sign of being aware of my presence.
“I will defend the territorial integrity of Graceland to the last cat,” Shary writes.
Judy is a young graphic designer from Toronto, with a long black braid and an eager narrow face. She’s sitting alone in the “friends and loved ones” room, until I ask if I can sit at her little table. Turns out Judy is here with her boyfriend of two years, Stefan, who got infected with Rat Catcher’s Yellows when they’d only been together a year. Stefan is a superstar in the Divine Right community.
“I have this theory that it’s all one compound organism,” says Judy. “The leptospirosis X, the people, the digital cats. Or at least, it’s one system. Sort of like real-life cats that infect their owners with Toxoplasma gondii, which turns the owners into bigger cat-lovers.”
“Huh.” I stare out through the gap in the ballroom wall, at the rows of people in cat masks all tapping away on their separate devices, like a soft rain. All genders, all ages, all sizes, wearing tracksuits or business-casual white-collar outfits. The masks bob up and down, almost in unison. Unblinking and
wide-eyed, governing machines.
At first Judy and I just bond over our stories of taking care of someone who barely recognizes us but keeps obsessively nation building at all hours. But we turn out to have a lot else in common, including an interest in Pre-Raphaelite art, and a lot of the same books.
The third day rolls around, and our flight back up to New Hampshire is that afternoon. I watch Shary hunched over her cat head, with Judy’s boyfriend sitting a few seats away, and my heart begins to sink. I imagine bundling Shary out of here, getting her to the airport and onto the plane, and then unpacking her stuff back at the house while she goes right back to her game. Days and days of cat-faced blankness ahead, forever. This trip has been some kind of turning point for Shary and the others, but for me nothing will have changed.
I’m starting to feel sorry for myself with a whole new intensity when Judy pokes me. “Hey.” I look up. “We need to stay in touch, you know,” Judy says.
I make a big show of adding her number to my phone, and then without even thinking, say: “Do you want to come stay with us? We have a whole spare bedroom with its own bathroom and stuff.”
Judy doesn’t say anything for a few minutes. She stares at her boyfriend, who’s sitting a few seats away from Shary. She’s taking slow, controlled breaths through closed teeth. Then she slumps a little, in an abortive shrug. “Yes. Yes, please. That would be great. Thank you.”
I sit with Judy and watch dozens of people in cat masks, sitting shoulder to shoulder without looking at each other. I have a pang of wishing I could just go live in Graceland, a place of which I am already a vassal in every way that matters. But also I feel weirdly proud, and terrified out of my mind. I have no choice but to believe this game matters, the cat politics is important, keeping Lord Hairballington in his place is a vital concern to everyone—or else I will just go straight-up insane.
For a moment, I think Shary looks up from the cat head in her hands and gives me a wicked smile of recognition behind her opaque plastic gaze. I feel so much love in that moment, it’s almost unbearable.
SAM J. MILLER
The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History
FROM Uncanny Magazine
Craig Perry, university administration employee
JUDY GARLAND, DEAD. That’s where it started. Dead five days before, in London, “an incautious overdosage” of barbiturates, according to the coroner, and her body had just come back to New York for burial. Twenty thousand people lined up to pay their respects. Every gay man in Manhattan must have gone, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go see her in that coffin and disturb the delicate Dorothy Gale I had in my head. I don’t know, I needed to move, to walk, to run. To do something. So I headed for the Hudson River Piers.
My sadness buoyed me up, made me feel like I was looking down on the entire city. I watched the sky go blue and orange and red and purple and indigo as the sun set, then watched the lights come on across the river in Jersey City. June 1969: The wet Manhattan air was like sick breath coming out of our collective throat.
I felt it in me, then. A spark. I didn’t see it for what it really was, but I felt it.
That’s why I went to the Stonewall.
Sadness is a better spark than rage. I remember thinking, Revolutions are born on nights like this. So many people would be mourning Judy. We’d all be miserable together. What couldn’t we do, if we were all on the same page like that? Now it sounds like I’m trying to be portentous, given what ultimately went down that night, but I really did have that feeling.
Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop
I checked with the sarge that afternoon. I always did, when I was off-duty and felt the urge and knew I couldn’t fight it, knew I’d have to find a place to dance it out of me. I was lucky I was a cop and could check to make sure I wouldn’t get swept up in a raid. Nothing was on the list for the Stonewall that night. That’s how I know for a fact that what went down that night was not your standard gay club raid. Someone upstairs was pulling strings.
I spent the whole week agonizing over whether or not to go. That’s how it always went. I’d wrestle with my fear and shame, and win, and go, and then feel so miserable and ashamed afterward that I leapt back into the closet for another few weeks. I needed some action, some booze, and some sweat and some sex with a stranger. Quentin and I had gone to the gym together, that afternoon, and I knew he had to work that night. He didn’t ask where I was going when I went out. Even twins are allowed to have little secrets. But he was the reason I stayed in the closet, and was always so careful to not get dragnetted. Seeing my name in the paper in a story on a gay bar raid—that would kill Quentin quicker and deader than any bullet.
The world changed in two huge ways that night.
In the first place, the world changed because the gays fought back. The police and the press were equally dumbfounded by the idea that a bar full of fairies would refuse to submit to one of the raids that were standard—if monstrously unjust—operating procedure. The Stonewall itself had been raided less than a week before. The night of June 28, 1969, should have been no different.
Secondly, the Stonewall Uprising was the first public demonstration of the supernatural phenomenon that would later be called by names as diverse as collective pyrokinesis, group magic, communal energy, polykinesis, multipsionics, liberation flame, and hellfire.
None of the eleven different city, state, and federal government agencies that investigated the events of that night have ever confirmed or even acknowledged the overwhelming number of witness testimonies describing the events that caused the police to so catastrophically lose control of a routine operation. The facts, however, do not seem to be in doubt. Ten police officers were vaporized that night, vanishing so utterly that the NYPD still considers them missing persons. Three more were cooked alive, charred to the point where dental records were needed to identify the bodies. No incendiary or flammable substances were found at the scene. Five paddy wagons full of arrestees were stopped when their engines spontaneously overheated, and the metal doors of the wagons were melted away to free the people inside—yet no blowtorches or welding equipment were found at the scene.
Since testimonials are all that’s left to those of us frustrated with the Official Version, the oral history format seems to be our best bet. I know that many of the most outspoken voices of the Stonewall Uprising have reacted with anger and hostility at the news that I, of all journalists, was planning to compile such a history, and are urging their comrades not to speak with me. I understand their objections, and have precious little to show by way of proof that I’ve changed. I simply cannot not tell this story.
—Jenny Trent, Editor (formerly of the New York Times)
Craig Perry, university administration employee
I know it’s dumb, but I felt like I had failed. Rage hadn’t gotten me anywhere. Being black, being gay, I’d been raising hell my whole life. Screaming nonstop, at the top of my lungs, at the bullies and the cops and the priests and the rest of the hateful sons of bitches, trying to get my brothers and sisters to stand up together, and for what? The world was still so rotten that beautiful creatures like Judy Garland couldn’t wait to get out of it. Sadness felt like the only rational response to a world like that.
Walking wasn’t enough, so I went to the gym to get my mind off things. It didn’t work. The twins were there, but not even the sight of them could cheer me up. One bearded and one mustachioed, both of their bodies the same impossible lumberjack/rugby player shape, wide-necked and wide-thighed, who did not seem to have aged a day in the seven years I’d been going to that gym. Sadness kept swallowing me back up, distracting me from the spectacle of them, happy and secure in their bubble of hetero-bro confidence. By the time I walked out of there, I was feeling incurably alone.
All I kept thinking was, Tonight, more than any other night, I need to dance. I need to be among my people.
Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop
Stonewall was fucking depressing. People paint
it as this great place where you could be who you really were. If that’s who you really were, you were really fucked. Run by the mob, painted all black inside, stinking of mold and charred wood because it had been boarded shut for twenty years after a big fire. I mean, every gay bar was a piece of shit—what did you expect when you couldn’t operate legally? The State Liquor Authority wouldn’t issue licenses to gay bars, and nobody runs illegal businesses but the mob. They didn’t even have running water, just a big plastic trough behind the bar, where they’d dunk the used glasses and then use them again. Not even any soap. The summer it opened there was a hepatitis outbreak.
But you went, because where else were you going to go? How else could you escape from the crushing weight of your waking life, and be among your own sick, twisted, beautiful kind?
Sergeant Abraham Asher, NYPD 6th Precinct police chief
We knew it was a full moon. Basic rule of policing: Don’t do crowd-control-type stuff on full moon nights. I don’t know why—people just lose their minds a little easier. This one had some pressure from upstairs, though, and was kind of a last-minute decision. But I can tell you this for goddamn sure: If I’da known Judy Garland had just died, we’d never have gone anywhere near the damn place.
That night essentially ruined my life. I got demoted. Every article painted me as a colossal idiot, and that’s taken a huge toll on my family. But I got no cause to complain, because a lot of my men didn’t come back from that night.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 Page 27
