Occupy Me

by Tricia Sullivan

  Shifting the sleeping baby, Jerry moved the glasses across the table and poked the screen to life. Alison stopped him at once.

  ‘Not a public screen.’

  Jerry made a patient face; obviously he wanted to argue that the university’s security would cover the data, but he didn’t. He pulled out a slightly grubby phone.

  ‘I’m afraid the baby’s been chewing it,’ he said. Then he showed Alison shots from the TEM.

  Alison’s first thoughts were that it was really cool. She had never used a TEM and was amazed at the detail of the images.

  ‘Now certain things about this are curious. The task I was given was to identify the feather, and after extensive searching I’m not able to do that definitively. There are some aberrations in the macro structure that are very interesting.’

  I’ll bet there are, Alison thought, drinking.

  ‘But it would take a zoologist to help with that. My interest is in the oil itself,’ he added. With a fine-boned finger he zoomed in on the barbs and there, in glorious detail, the molecular chains of the oil itself could be seen. ‘Here. Look at that. That’s not a hydrocarbon.’

  Alison looked. ‘See those? Those ones are hydrocarbons by the truckload interacting with one another on the surface of the barb. But look at this. A carbon-carbon structure.’

  ‘Ooh,’ said Alison through a mouthful of peanuts. ‘So what’s that, then?’

  Jerry said, ‘Let’s go closer. Look at this. See these irregularities? There is no way this structure should hold together chemically, much less bond to the cellulose the way it does. The bond angles don’t make sense and the electrical properties just shouldn’t work. And yet they do. The compound forms bonds with the cellulose in the feather, and indeed you can see that we have some very long strings in this sample. It’s quite shocking and the regularity of the arrays isn’t something that occurs in nature.’

  ‘So this oil,’ Alison said. ‘It can’t be natural, can it? I mean, someone has tampered with it.’

  ‘This is my whole point. This feather can’t be natural. The efficiency of the bonding is streets ahead of anything we can do in our department. We don’t have the processes to begin put something like this together – and it’s a bit of a surprise, really, because new developments do have a way of getting around prior to publication. But you must know more about this than I do. Joon Il explicitly said I was to turn over my findings to Pearl and no one else. I must admit I’m curious, though. Who do you guys work for, and why didn’t you use your own TEM?’

  It was sheer good luck that the baby woke up at this point and began to grizzle. Jerry had to pay attention to her, and then while he was sorting out a bottle Alison said,

  ‘Speaking of zoologists. Do you know anyone who specialises in reptiles? We’ve got something we need to identify.’

  He shrugged. ‘Sure. Is it alive?’

  ‘Er . . . no.’

  ‘Keep it on ice, then. I’ll make a call tomorrow, but it may take some time to find the right person.’

  ‘You said the rest of the molecules were hydrocarbons.’

  ‘Polymer chains, largely. I gave it to a colleague to analyse and she makes it as crude oil probably dating to the late Cretaceous. It’s just that there are these structures floating around in it. Some of them are quite long, but they’re very fine and tangled, and it’s the interaction of these segments with the feather that is really quite remarkable.’

  ‘Where’s the sample?’ Alison said. ‘I’d like it back, please.’

  ‘Of course you would,’ he said. ‘And I can give it back, of course. I just hoped you might be interested in collaborating in some way. You know, this is the most fascinating thing I’ve ever seen and whatever it is you’re doing, I’d love to be a part of it.’

  He sat the baby down in his lap so that she was facing Alison. She had on a little hat, and her cheeks were flushed.

  Alison laughed out loud. ‘Did you bring the baby to soften me up? If so, it’s working. She’s a bonny wean, isn’t she?’

  The baby gurgled.

  ‘Think about it,’ said Jerry. ‘I can see there’s something going on here, maybe something a little bit cloak and dagger. I just want you to know that I can be discreet.’

  Alison threw back her drink.

  ‘I’ll think about it.’ She held out her hand. ‘Just hand over the sample, please.’

  Gilligan’s Island

  It’s not that I was disassociated from my body. I felt every part of myself, from my furled innards to the stretching quality of my wings that could travel so far down into abstraction that their borders became numbers became colours became sounds, and still I was aware.

  But I was in more than one place and there were more than one of me, there were thousands of entities, some clamouring, some slumbering, all rapt in my flesh. I was on a flat plane pocked with collision marks, and in the distance I could see shapes like stylised trees or telegraph wires. I was underwater. I was on a crowded train, my chest hot where I was pressed against someone’s back and I just wanted to get out. I was arrowing through space, bouncing off a gravity well with an acceleration that left five eighths of my memory lagging behind me. I was under geologic time in the terrible press of a diamond factory. I was unspooled into 2D and birds were picking at my insides which contained people, entire cultures. I wrestled with my own perceptions, determined to settle in one place and time.

  I heard myself gasping and mewling. There was sand in my mouth and gummy matter had accumulated in my eyes, so that when I opened them my vision was blurry. I smelled fire.

  The birds’ movements stuttered to a halt. The birds were made of clay with silver eyes.

  The pain came from my back, where my wings had been either wrenched off or nearly so; judging from the sprawl of dark feathers I could feel against my cheek, they were still attached to me. Spasms pulsed and stabbed through nerves from my head to the back of my heels, so that my entire dorsal side was seething in fraught silence. I took little puffs of bitter, fiery air through my nostrils, telling myself to relax because the slightest twitch set off a chain reaction in my nervous system.

  My surroundings. Scrap metal scrolling into the sky. Wracked insides of structures mangled with frozen remnants of smashed bionics. Fungi smearing the remains of satellites and coils of cheap copper nanostructures thrumming a little in stray magnetic fields. Flexible towers, fluid-filled: through smudges in the fine grey dust coating the casing I could see they still housed colonial organisms in columns of fluorescence. Bruised optimisation trees cranking out atmosphere within a sky membrane that billowed like an unsecured marquee because it was being bombarded by space dust.

  Sparks were floating down from the sky as if from a wood fire. I couldn’t see any wood. I couldn’t see the ground, either. There was skeletal wreckage of structure everywhere, and flaking biomechanical joints bent like stamped-on cigarettes. In the flickering light the twisted scaffolding looked organic some of the time; sometimes it looked like the remains of an earthquake-shredded city with stars shining through exposed depths where the floor should have been.

  It now seemed that my belly was caught in an irregular mesh of flexible alloy with void below, so that I felt like an insect trapped by a drain. My legs twisted to one side and my wings were partly trapped by one another and by something else, too: collapsed architecture, I think. I could hear ocean not so far away, but the smell was all wrong.

  And here were the birds that had been pecking at my innards as if I were roadkill. They were large like costumed players, and they squatted with black feathers puffed out and crabbed grey scaly feet grasping the broken chords without slipping. They watched me side-on through one eye apiece. They scrambled and jerked from place to place, moving erratically in a way that made me suspect I wasn’t quite in sync with their time frame. Their feathers were made of black plastic trash bags and their eyes were electron holes. No, I’m joking. Their feathers were made of hot asphalt and their eyes were spores. No, no, thei
r feathers were made of—

  –P.E.A.R.L! You found your way back! We are saved.

  Tendons, where are you? Nerves. Come on. Pull together now. Like a sculling team. Pull.

  I managed to flex one muscle and with a juddering sensation the rest of my body found some way of shrinking, organising itself around my spine. The sense of travelling in far-flung star nurseries faded, the weight of being trapped underground lifted, and I felt my fingertips again. Multitudes moved with me as I tried to sit up.

  There was a field of light where the sky should be. Like a ceiling made of flame.

  What is that? I felt the hum of my voice along the beams supporting me. Bird claws clacked in answer as the nearest of them shifted their perch. It seemed a kind of ventriloquism when they spoke

  –Plasma shield.

  This was said the way an office receptionist might say ‘lobby’.

  One of the others flew up and poked the sky with a forked stick. It flared, glimmering like the inside of a soap bubble. We were inside an ovoid. I had been here before. I now remembered that the rushing noise wasn’t the sea, but a power generator that worked in cycles.

  –Sorry about the pain. We’re working on it.

  The voice was almost human. Surprisingly kind.

  Now their beak felt like a pencil poking through the feathers of my right wing. This didn’t hurt; my pain came from somewhere deeper than flesh. Was my back broken?

  With a rustling movement a large bird head came around the side of my wing. A single eye regarded me, and the beak disengaged from my wing.

  I remember being swallowed by a spinosaurus. What happened to the briefcase?

  –You mean your waveform launcher.

  Yeah, that.

  –We’ve reinstalled it. Tricky business, with the bullet holes.

  Another bird set a clay bowl before me. They each looked different, but otherwise it was as if I were conversing with a single entity that had various bodies since each of them picked up where the others left off.

  –I shall help you drink.

  They were beside me on the ground, feathers and cloth. I don’t know where the claws went but now they had hands in fingerless gloves with mauve dirt under their nails. The hands lifted my head, put the bowl to my lips and I sipped.

  In the liquid swirled system channels and upgrades and something sweet that didn’t quite mask the foul taste.

  –A little more.

  I forced it back. My scalp tingled and the sensation of pulleys and knives in my wings began to recede.

  You’re the birdmasters.

  It was the only name for them that I had. I wanted to add something more, but I was afraid I’d say it and I’d be wrong and they’d tell me so. And I’d be rejected, an outsider again.

  I took a long breath as if gathering courage under my ribs and then I risked it.

  You’re my mothers, I said.

  One of them inclined his head in acknowledgement. It was such an old, graceful gesture, so human – apart from the beak.

  You look like scavengers.

  Laughter at this; then there was an abrupt noise as of nails on a blackboard. I flinched. The sky was shimmering again where something had struck the plasma shield. The birds ruffled their feathers, changed positions nervously, and then settled.

  What do you scavenge, exactly?

  –Waveforms. We make new beings from old. We save the lost, the forgotten – the homeless, like ourselves.

  And me? You scavenged me?

  This would explain a few things. The stitched-together feeling, my ungainly size. The bolts in the sides of my neck. Wait—

  –You could say we scavenged you. We didn’t make you from scratch, we put you together out of parts we found after the Crunch.

  The Crunch. I could see it in my mind’s eye: a slowly rippling cataclysm that had sucked the order out of hypercivilisations, spreading through spacetime creating discontinuities and ruptures in the laws of physics. Caused by a kind of vacuum of order – the vanishing of a great Something.

  It is because of the Crunch that we were now trapped in a bubble of atmosphere in an asteroid field in deep space. Our environment had been folded; this world was the size of a mote in the eye of a dead man crushed to a pulp in geologic time. We were in a briefcase in a spinosaurus on the ocean of prediction. We thought we were small but we were very, very large. We thought we are large but that wasn’t right, either.

  It’s like Horton Hears a Who.

  Also: The briefcase was distributed through my bone marrow, like osteoporosis.

  The impacts against the plasma field that made the sky bloom? They were caused by wreckage.

  –We have made calculations. There is a steep decay constant attached to the survival of the plasma shield. It won’t last long.

  I pulled myself to my feet, feeling like a broken tree. My wings spread wide to balance me on the wrack of broken architecture like fake bones. It was obvious that the plasma shield is a thin defence. I had come home just in time for it to be destroyed.

  You can’t escape? What about HD?

  –After the Crunch started we found the waveform launcher and installed it in you. It was damaged, and we had to graft it into your wings, which was difficult, but this is the art we practise. The P.E.A.R.L. scans waveforms which are then stored in HD for relaunch at another contact point – either across a fold in this universe or in another. In this way information can be transferred from one place to another without tangling with Newtonian rules. You don’t remember?

  I was stolen. I can’t recall whatever came before. Kisi says I scanned him, but I can’t remember it.

  –You did scan and archive waveforms. The launcher was broken but the scanner worked, so we taught you to use that. We traded some of the waveforms you brought in – including Kisi Sorle’s.

  He was telling the truth. You sold him on the galactic market?

  The bird mothers had lice in their feathers, and dust. They answered my questions with such patience, but every time an object struck the sky, they scuttled and trembled.

  –We sold that waveform to purchase the logic needed to repair the launcher. We had you in the nest. We were in the process of upgrading you when Kisi Sorle’s waveform discovered he could identify with another pattern. He rose up and took control of your consciousness. We lost contact.

  The briefcase.

  –That is its present configuration, yes.

  So tell me. Did you make the other angels? Are you part of the Resistance?

  –The discoveries that could have built the Resistance were contingent upon Austen Stevens’ money being used to fund it. We didn’t make the Resistance. Humans did. They also unmade it – spectacularly, as you witnessed.

  They do this kind of thing all the time.

  –Just saying.

  Moving around the confined space of my mothers’ refuge, I found broken egg shells and smears. I climbed closer to the plasma shield and that’s when I saw something tucked in the depths of the scaffolding, surrounded by ruined storage facilities and in the roots of the optimisation trees. It was a sort of nest of intelligent hair and leaves that rot into information spores and damaged crystal, smoky with doping.

  –We can’t last. We’re stuck here like barnacles. We just needed a way off the rock and we hoped to trade for a complete ship but we couldn’t afford the price. We were lucky to get the logic fixes. The group we traded with only wanted human waveforms because they are a low-biology culture and they needed intelligent animals.

  I witnessed the transaction in their memory. The arrival of the so-called group, a swarming presence that came to my bird mothers’ home and took Kisi’s waveform from a bird’s beak as though exchanging a machine kiss. Then gone again, to do godknowswhat with Kisi’s scanned waveform.

  It’s horrific.

  –We were doing his waveform a favour, whether or not he can see that. The alternative would have been to put him in the library with all of the others. He probably wouldn’t have r
isen up then. He would still be waiting for another chance at life.

  How can you have a library on a chunk of space rock?

  –In our wings, of course. Can’t you feel the open spaces in your feathers?

  I can feel astronomical events in my feathers if that’s what you mean.

  –It is a question of levels. Of folding. We can store materials in HD but the Immanence left us behind. If the plasma shield goes, so will we and then the gates will be lost to everything we have collected.

  The Immanence, the Immanence. You keep saying the word as if it’s a reality, not a concept.

  –The Immanence is an intelligence far beyond any of us. It rose out of a hypercivilisation and was a great ordering in the universe that came about because entropy favours higher order. One of its accomplishments was to use HD folding techniques to connect distant places topologically. It left its fingerprints all over our spacetime. The Immanence reached a peak of development and was about to slide into accelerated entropic decay, and that’s when it made an escape hatch from this universe. It had found ways around and through our universe and into others. The Immanence took its higher order and fled, leaving us with the bill.

  A cosmic credit crunch.

  But it’s not gone. Not gone gone. Because I can sense consciousness in stones and light. Because there are passageways that it left behind, the inversions of neural structure, higher orders beyond the reaches of human mathematics.

  –We think it’s moved somewhere across or up or down a level, into some other universe or a different order of abstraction, maybe where we can’t see it. All we know is that it left this universe. It left us stranded here, and we can’t get out.

  The bird mothers and I stare at one another. It bothers me how I never get to look at both eyes. They are like entangled fermions, determining one another’s state across the span of their skull. Each shines, compelling and eager – maybe all the more so for the fact that the other is only ever implied.

  I begin to poke around in the nest. I can see lumpy shapes in there, wet things with nubbly edges– nothing as elegant as eggs. But something. What are they making?