Existence is Elsewhen

by John Gribbin

  Nodding in final readiness, she palmed the control for her door locks and stepped out into the wide landing outside her apartment. The building’s managers actually spent some of the rent on upkeep, so it was unusually clean and neat, and nearly all the lights worked nearly all the time. It was, really, quite upmarket for this area of the city. Though not without its hazards.

  She dodged backwards as her door quietly swung closed,and pressed herself to it as a running gunfight blistered past her. The four children were using empty bottles and sticks as weapons and engaging in all-out-war down the corridors and through-ways of the building.

  “Hey! Watch where you’re shooting!”

  “Sorry Mrs Waters!”

  “Mrs?” she shouted at their retreating backs, incredulous.

  Low chuckling followed its owner up the corridor as one of the mothers paused beside her.

  “Aren’t I too young for kids to be calling me ‘Mrs’?”

  “Well, you’re past ten, dear.”

  Ryan made a sulky harumphing sound and glared at the disappearing children before turning back to her companion.

  “Anyway, this old biddy is going over to Henderson for early lunch, do you or the other families want anything from the market?”

  The older woman smiled gratefully.

  “If there’s any of those fresh-grown pears like last week’s batch, I’d appreciate it. Most else we can get downstairs.”

  Ryan nodded. “Sure thing then, I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “Thanks Rye.”

  She smiled her deeply lined smile again, and un-hurriedly made her way after the disappeared warfare, whilst Ryan turned and made her own way to the staircases at the other end of the hall.

  She dodged and danced around a delivery man clambering up to the 20s, as well as the kids from her floor when they came sprinting down past her, the sticks now apparently become swords. Managing to avoid being run through, she reached the ground floor, and crossed the small courtyard to the main atrium. The hydroponic garden filling the courtyard was the housing complex’s pride and joy – it grew vegetables all year round, maintained by volunteers from throughout the building. The management didn’t mind, because the landlord who lived on the almost-palatial top floor grew herbal teas in the garden for his wife – it made her happy, which made him happy. Since the combined rents easily covered the cost of the ’ponics lights, and the added allure meant that empty rooms only stayed that way for as long as it took him to advertise, it was a very welcome addition to his property.

  It made for a welcoming sight when you got home, too. The cramped alleys and neon-encrusted streets outside in the Copper Corridor, one of the less affluent sectors of November, contrasted quite starkly with the softly lit green utopia nestled here. When the plants weren’t being mist-watered, the small preschool on the third storey would regularly bring its students down into the garden to read and play. It was as close to some kind of idyll as you’d likely get, outside parks or upcity.

  “Tomatoes are coming on nicely, Rimah!” Ryan called out to a man perched on a ladder, changing a bulb above one of the vegetable racks.

  “That they are! Want me to set some aside for you?”

  “I’ll love you unendingly. Want anything from Henderson?”

  The man paused a moment, tapping his chin exaggeratedly.

  “There’s that stall usually sells manure for fertilising herb gardens, if you could pick me up a dozen bags, I’d-”

  He cut off as he saw Ryan’s eyes narrow.

  “Christ girl I’m kidding, come on now. See if there’s any seeds what we haven’t got growing here already. Alright?”

  “You’re on thin ice, Rim.”

  The man’s laughter followed her out into the street.

  The raucous noise of the Henderson market made itself known long before Ryan actually reached the plaza – mostly the sound of chatter, of shouting vendormen advertising their wares, but also the sounds of flickerdrives in motion, cars and vans moving into and out of the plaza’s airspace.

  The next tell was the streets themselves – the buildings became that little bit fancier and more decorative, the roads that little bit better taken care of. They were busier, too, with people streaming to and from the market. Ryan melted into the flow of people, flicking her link’s display active for a moment to check the time – she was cutting it close. Syke wouldn’t mind if she were late, but he’d tease her about being punctual; that was far worse.

  She hurried her pace, and stepped out into Henderson Plaza market, the cacophony reaching its crescendo of overlapping voices and languages. As always, it was packed to bursting all through the western end of the plaza – that’s where all the food stalls were, and that’s where the majority of the day’s shopping was: fresh fruit and vegetables grown out of a hundred small privately-run hydroponics domes dotted around the edges of the city.

  Ryan pushed her way through the crowds around the fast-food stalls, working towards the fruits sellers – if there were pears to be found today, they’d be there. Trying to find the right stall amongst the many was hard, especially with people bustling all over, but eventually she found it. The small stall was run by an equally small man, who seemed far out of his depth. Shy and unassuming, he simply sat with a serene smile whilst people tried to argue his wares down. Ryan didn’t know him all that well, but she knew better than to bother begging a lower price; he was iron. So she grabbed a bag of six pears, and handed him the requisite coin without argument, earning a smile and pleased nod from him before he went right back into the attempted negotiations of the rest.

  Gripping her spoils tightly, Ryan made her way out into the less-busy aisles and lanes of the market. They’d pick up as the day wore on, but the morning belonged to the grocers.

  She briefly considered eating one of the pears but, annoying as the kids from down the hall could be at times, pears were their favourite treat. She fought down the urge and tapped her link active again. She briefly berated herself for the fact that she still hadn’t fixed the battery – leaving it active constantly wasn’t a luxury it could handle at the moment – but she kept just not quite finding the time.

  As, she realised, she had done now – she was late. God only knows where that twenty minutes had gone, but she was late. Her pace picked up and she made her way into the electronics stalls where she knew Syke would be waiting for her, breaking through the crowds and finally reaching the almost quiet electrics lanes. She checked them one after the other, and finally turned a corner, to see him standing at the other end of a short run of stalls.

  “Ryan? Damn girl, you’re early.”

  “Early? But it’s–” she broke off mid sentence. Syke smiled.

  “You still haven’t fixed your link, huh?”

  Ryan sighed and rolled her eyes. Now it was running fast. Great.

  Syke made his way slowly up the lane towards her, and she saw something strange in his eyes. She couldn’t place it.

  She was still trying to work it out when he spoke again, a couple of metres from her.

  “Want a peppermint?”

  Immediately, every muscle in Ryan’s body tensed and she fought to not let it show. Why was he using the warning? What was wrong?

  Suddenly her link’s HUD display flared white and fizzled out, and computer tech along the lane sparked and died. Panic erupted across the stalls as vendors tried to save their wares.

  Syke reached her.

  “Sorry, I had to do it. They bugged me and I had to blow it. We don’t have much time.”

  “The fuck man? Who bugged you, what’s wrong?”

  “The Seven.”

  Ryan’s blood ran cold.

  “That stuff in the Redstone vault?” he continued, rushing his words, “Most of it was theirs. Front businesses all. Nix should’ve checked closer, stupid bastard. Word gets around fast, Ryan. They know it was us.”

  She tried to say something, but he held a hand up.

  “Sorry girl there’s no time.
They caught me on the way over here. They don’t know where you live, but they intercepted my message. They’re here to get you and they’re doing it through me. They might’ve already got Nix and Jace, I don’t know about the others. And fuck knows about Kay. They can’t hear us talking now, but they had men going up into that building at the end of the lane. They had a sniper.”

  “Jesus, Syke, what do we do?”

  She finally recognised what was in his eyes. Sadness. Regret. Why was there no anger?

  “If we leave here alive, they’ll kill my family.”

  She froze. They wouldn’t, would they? Yes, she decided, of course they would.

  “You... you have to kill me Rye. You have to do it now, and then run. Down that alley, away, back to your place. Load up and disappear. Find the others if you can, but run.”

  “What? You know I can’t do that! We’ll get out of it, we’ll get your family and – ”

  “No, we can’t. They have men with my family already. If you kill me here they’ll think I did what they wanted and you gunned me down. Take my link too, I have the details from the vault in here and they know it – they’ll think you’re just after the money.”

  “Syke, I can’t do this, I...”

  “You have to and you know it. I have a gun in my hip holster. Make it quick, Rye.”

  Syke reached around Ryan and pulled her close, hugging her tighter than he ever had in the decade they’d been friends.

  “And tell Lizzy and the kids that I love them, okay?”

  He choked the words out, trying not to let tears out with them.

  Ryan had no such compunction; tears slipped down her cheeks as she held him tight for a moment. Her hand slipped down to his hip. There it was. His favourite gun.

  She slowly drew it out and brought it around between them.

  “Do it Ryan.”

  “Syke...”

  “Do it!”

  Ryan pulled back, gun in hand aimed directly for Syke’s forehead.

  “I’m sorry, Johnathan.”

  The gun kicked madly in her hand, the loud report ringing louder in the close quarters between the electronics stalls. Syke’s body sagged, its strings cut, and he crumpled downwards. Ryan grabbed him, trying to bite down on the wracking sobs fighting to come out, and reached down to slip his link off his wrist. She shoved it deep into her jacket pocket, Syke’s pistol alongside it. She stood, taking in the horrified expressions of the vendors around her – those who hadn’t immediately run and ducked for cover when she drew the gun, at least. She looked up at the building overlooking the lane’s end, and saw a window on the third storey slide open. The man behind wore an upcity suit and an undercity expression. He fumbled as he wrestled a rifle up to the window and aimed down at her.

  A suddenly jerking motion took control and she part fell, part ran to the opposite end of the lane, slipping around the corner on the wet pavings and running for all she was worth towards the alley Syke had indicated. A bullet cracked off the ground behind her, blistering through the space she’d have occupied if she’d gone on straight. Three more tore through the cloth awning of the stall she was hidden behind, sparking off metal struts and stone floor. A fourth was stopped by the unlucky stallholder, who fell into and ripped through the fabric, holding his arm and screaming.

  Ryan ran for all she was worth.

  The alley opened up before her and she disappeared into it, past horrified pedestrians and a parked flickercar. A droplet flew through the air behind her, blown from her cheek. It splashed down into a puddle lying undisturbed on the ground. As Ryan dashed around the cornering alleyway, the salt water mingled and disappeared into the oiled rainwater and the sun continued to rise on a beautiful day for awful things.

  Bird Brains

  by

  Douglas Thompson

  Douglas Thompson’s short stories have appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, most recently Albedo One, Ambit, Postscripts, New Writing Scotland and The Speculative Book. He won the Grolsch/Herald Question of Style Award in 1989 and second prize in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition in 2007. His first book, Ultrameta, was published in August 2009, nominated for the Edge Hill Prize, and shortlisted for the BFS Best Newcomer Award, and since then he has published further novels, Sylvow (Eibonvale, 2010), Apoidea (The Exaggerated Press, 2011), Mechagnosis (Dog Horn, 2012), Entanglement (Elsewhen Press, 2012), The Brahan Seer (Acair Publishing, 2014), Volwys and other stories (Dog Horn, 2014), The Rhymer, an Heredyssey (Elsewhen Press, 2014) and The Sleep Corporation (The Exaggerated Press, 2015).

  I

  I used to be a particle physicist you know. No, really, I’m not shitting you. But of course these days I’m just a drunk. Most drunks drink to forget, but I drink to forget something that hasn’t happened yet. Confused? You, as they say, will be. I’ll just cut to the chase right now then, shall I? I’m not a tease. The Large Hadron Collider will soon create an event which has only happened once before in Earth’s history. On that occasion, it was an accident caused by a meteor strike. Yes, the same one that wiped out the dinosaurs. But it didn’t just wipe out them and other life forms, it reversed the polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field and thereby reversed the arrow of time on this planet. Now, I know you’ll be starting to struggle with the implications of that, so did I at first. At first, now what was it at first that put me on to this idea? -This idea that grew into my head until it became on obsession and then as I progressively confirmed it with one test and experiment after another: a terrifying fact. Am I talking too fast for you?

  Dinosaurs. This is so obvious that you’re going to kick yourself when you hear it. They had feathers. Archaeologists and scientists have been progressively accepting this over the last twenty years as more fossils confirming it have come to light. Nobody seemed bothered by this except for me. But feathers make no sense on dinosaurs. They are hollow under a microscope, a highly evolved adaptation to combine incredible lightness with the ability to give uplift in flight. A large heavy flightless carnivore would have no need for them. Unless, unless. Unless time has reversed, and dinosaurs are going to evolve from the birds we have now, here in our present, and their feathers are just leftover traces from that. Why would they evolve like that? They would do it if there was a catastrophic event which wiped out all large mammals and left birds as the dominant and ascendant species on earth. They would do that if that same event reversed the direction of time.

  If you think this is crazy then I’ll give you ten minutes to go away and look up time reversal on your beloved internet and then come back to me. It’s accepted as completely possible at the level of particle physics, and only questionable at our macro level due to the inherently entropic nature of organic life. Entropy: energy is constantly being lost, things decay and die, shit happens. A reverse-direction universe would be anti-entropic, energy would be being created all the time. Sounds rather joyous actually. Something for nothing, things appearing out of thin air. Gravity, interestingly, is a time-neutral event. Think about it. Toss a ball up in the air and it come down to earth, or the ball fires itself off the ground and loops down into your hand which then lowers it back down to earth again. Perfect symmetry. Something organic, like baking a cake or gunning down thirty unarmed civilians, on the other hand, looks pretty different depending on time direction. Cake made from ingredients, people turned into worm food: cake turned into flour, living people made out of soil. Quite a magic trick.

  If only the damned birds didn’t exist. I know we all love their songs and their pretty colours, me as much as the next guy, but their mere existence tells us that a time-reversal event is due soon in order to start turning them back into dinosaurs. If they weren’t here, we could conclude that only one time-reversal event occurred in Earth’s history and it’s been going forward ever since, and was going backwards all the time before. You making sense of this? I’m thirsty, man. That old bag over there behind the counter doesn’t serve me anymore. I’ve got money. You buy me a couple of bottles of
whisky with this cash and I’ll come back and tell you some more of this next week, give you time to get your head around it. We got ourselves a deal?

  *

  You looked me up, really? Wow, I’m impressed and flattered. You believe me now, I really did work at CERN. I was drummed out for alcohol problems? Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? To discredit me, of course, as a scientific heretic. They’re worse than the Spanish Inquisition these days, the scientific community. Cruelly intolerant of all forms of dissent. Take it from me, man, I got their sharp end right up my jacksy. You want more proof of my theories? Another couple of bottles first please. I might even show you my laboratory, if you’re nice to me.

  *

  Bit of a mess this place, sorry. My wife Marie left me six months ago. Understandable really, I don’t blame her. It was all the dead birds that got to her I think, and the glass chambers and the electrical wires. You want a drink, my friend? Really? You sure? I think you’re going to need one when you see this shit. Here, mind your feet there, just step over the transformer and compressor… that’s liquid nitrogen that tube, don’t want to freak you, but be careful, you bust that one and you’ll know all about it. Right, follow me, just up a couple of ladders now, into the attic. You’re not claustrophobic or anything are you? Good. No terror of birds either? Terror of birds in confined spaces? Good, you’re cut out for this job. You sure you’re not a reporter, mister? You do seem ideal for this.

  I know, I know. Now you know where I’ve been putting all the empty bottles. Nothing goes to waste in this household. Nor in this garden. The suburbs still supply a fine selection of bird species, despite mankind’s ravages of the erstwhile biological diversity of the Belgian countryside through pollution and over-development. Yeah, just shift those notebooks out the way, make yourself a seat there, get comfortable. You sure you don’t want a drink? This will take a while at first until the equipment heats up, until your eyes adjust to the hazy atmosphere. Chemicals, drugs? No man, a bit of formaldehyde here and there, a few free radicals and ionised trace elements, argon and helium: nothing harmful.