King of the Worlds

by M. Thomas Gammarino

  They boarded a water taxi and passed through a flotilla of couples and kids pedaling around the harbor in green, dragon-shaped boats. Ducks quacked. Dylan found himself choked up all of a sudden by the cerulean sky, which was just so unmistakably Earthly (atmospheric plankton on New Taiwan lent the sky an aquamarine tinge). He had at last come home, or nearly—technically, he’d been to Baltimore just once before. His whole family had driven down to visit the National Aquarium when he was a kid, and what he remembered most from that visit, more than the shark walk or the tropical rainforest even, was the Giant Pacific Octopus, with its undulating tentacles and countless suckers, its quicksilver camouflage, its slit eyes that betrayed some calculating but inscrutable intelligence. Despite all the alien worlds that had been discovered in the years since, it struck Dylan now that Earth’s Giant Pacific Octopus remained in some archetypal way the most alien creature he’d ever seen.

  They debarked at what Ashley told him was the best restaurant in town and got a seat al fresco, right by the water’s edge. At her suggestion, they ordered some beers from a local brewery called Flying Dog.

  “This is pretty surreal,” Ashley said. “Having lunch with Dylan Greenyears—I never thought I’d see the day.”

  “It is pretty uncanny.”

  “Actually, I used to fantasize that we’d get married someday, but I guess at some point I gave you up for lost.”

  They proceeded to make all sorts of small talk, though it was not so small for her presumably, and really it wasn’t so small for him either given what it was doing to his ego. He was also learning quite a lot. As a rule, he paid no attention to Terran affairs anymore, so every topical or pop-culture reference she made was lost on him, and she made enough of them that he had the defamiliarizing pleasure of hearing his own first language in what amounted to a foreign dialect. Still, he managed to glean a good bit of propositional content too. He learned, for instance, that her bedroom as a girl had been bedecked with posters of him that she’d torn out of Teen Beat and Seventeen, and that she still had every word of Nocturnal Fears memorized. He learned that these days she worked as a certified public accountant, that she did triathlons, that she was married to a cop and had three kids.

  When she asked what he did with himself these days, he replied, a little ashamedly, “Teaching, mostly.”

  “Teaching acting?”

  “Among other things.”

  “I see.” She nodded as if impressed, though he was quite sure she wasn’t.

  On the bright side, the beer was good and the crab cakes were spectacular—plump with imperial meat, lightly breaded, and seasoned with Old Bay. The fries were excellent too. The coleslaw was neither here nor there.

  “So I hope you don’t mind if I ask the million-quid question?” Ashley said.

  “Does it have anything to do with a movie about a sinking boat?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess I’d prefer if you didn’t ask it then.”

  “Okay. All right. I get that.”

  He hadn’t meant to sound so brusque. He had hoped it wouldn’t come up, though he’d been fairly certain it would. At least he’d nipped it in the bud, though an awkward lull followed. They finished their beers and studied the seagulls in silence, not bothering to look at each other until the waiter came to ask if they were interested in dessert.

  “I think we’ll be leaving actually,” Ashley said.

  “The check then?”

  “Please.”

  Mercifully, a plane was flying by overhead, trailing an advertising banner that read CANCER CELLS HAVE RIGHTS TOO! It gave them something to look at. When the check finally arrived, Dylan took it and rifled through his wallet for cash. He hadn’t used Terran money in years, and he’d never used the Terran quid, so it took him quite a long time to pay. Leave it to James Cameron to turn this into a disaster too. Dylan had come 2,001 light years, allowed a previous copy of himself to be murdered, lied unabashedly to his wife, and all for what?

  Crab cakes? What a sentimental fool he’d been to think anything redemptive might come of this.

  “Can I leave the tip?” Ashley asked.

  “It was generous enough of you to meet me,” Dylan said.

  “So let’s be honest,” Ashley said. “That was by all accounts a pretty terrible meal. Not the food—the food was good—but you and I just did not hit it off at all, am I right?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have contacted you.”

  “That’s not what I’m driving at,” she said. “I’m glad you did.”

  This took him by surprise.

  “Look,” she went on, “here’s my situation, and I’m just going to lay all my cards on the table because I literally don’t have time for subtlety. Basically I’ve got three hours before I have to pick my kids up from gymnastics.” She pulled a tube of Mentos out of her purse and slipped one of them into her mouth.

  “I understand,” he said. “I won’t waste another minute of your time—”

  “And I happen to know an inexpensive little hotel around the way…”

  Dylan suffered the psychic equivalent of whiplash. “What? You want to go to a hotel?”

  “Well, I don’t particularly, but my inner teenager would never forgive me if I didn’t, and unless my thirty-year study of human nature is totally off base, I’m pretty sure you’re on board. Mint?”

  “To be honest, I hadn’t really thought that far ahead,” he said.

  “So think now.”

  He took a Mento, popped it in his mouth, and thought. It was strange, but while he was very clearly cheating on Erin in some way already, he had not explicitly conceived of this escapade in sexual terms until now. Not explicitly explicitly. Had the accountant turned out to be the better reader of human nature than the master of literature?

  His tinnitus keened.

  His brain was dying.

  Amanda Cruz thought he was sixty.

  Okay, he’d thought about it. “Let’s go,” he said.

  She smiled, took his hand, and led him around the way. They didn’t waste another second of each other’s lives on conversation.

  Ashley was right at that age where the body is shouting Procreate! One more time! Now or never! And so she was absolutely ravenous in bed. He had never been on the receiving end of so much—meaningless, pure—aggression before. She dug her nails into his back, moaned, talked dirty, slurped the dripping sweat from his neck, and, intermittently possessed by some demon, locked her legs around his waist and bucked so wild and out of control that he worried his dick would break—and what kind of excuse was he going to give Erin about that? Nonetheless, indeed all the more, it was the best sex he’d ever had in his life. What it was not, however, was transcendent. It didn’t make him young again, or hopeful, or free. It didn’t take him back to the moon or the silver screen. No, as they rutted around that afternoon, Dylan never once escaped that moderately priced hotel room, the sweaty bag of his skin, the unidirectional arrow of time, and all the accumulated head-weight of history and circumstance. And even as Ashley whispered in his ear, “Fuck me, Dylan Greenyears, like it’s the last thing you’ll ever do,” he found himself wondering just who she believed she was fucking anyway. Did she really think he was the same person whose glossy photos used to hang on the wall of her bedroom? Who’d acted in those films? He had certain memories in common with that younger man, sure, though his way of thinking about them, his orientation toward them, had changed beyond recognition, as had his wealth and social status. Even without teleportation, every cell in his body would have replaced itself many times over since he’d been a star. What of that star remained then? Only brute biological patterns, the way his DNA instructed his body to assemble proteins so that he still bore some resemblance to the hominid she’d once fantasized about marrying someday—and even those patterns were subject to change over time. All of that was e
qually true of her too, of course: this athletic thirty-something adulteress presently seated athwart his chin was by no means the same Teen Beat subscriber who’d once chaired the Dylan Greenyears fan club at her high school. They were the both of them impostors. Still, it was nice.

  As soon as she’d swallowed his cum, Dylan asked, “Hadn’t you better get going?”

  She looked at the clock—”Six minutes ago!” Then she sprang up and began getting dressed.

  “Any chance you’re free again tomorrow?” he asked. “Or this evening for that matter?”

  “Oh,” she said, and she cut the pace of getting into her shirt by half.

  “What?”

  “I thought we might be on the same page about this.”

  “What page is that?” Dylan asked.

  “The one where this is a one-time deal. The one where I don’t think we should see each other again.”

  “I see. I was definitely on a really different page.”

  “Dylan, look, I enjoyed being with you this afternoon. Once we stopped attempting to communicate, it was really wonderful. I got to live out a fantasy. This’ll sound weird, but I felt like I was surfing on the back of a dolphin.”

  “Come again?”

  “Surfing on a dolphin. I’ve wanted to do that ever since I saw some guy do it at the aquarium when I was a little girl. It seems so magical, and yet I have no doubt in my mind that those people who get to do that for a living curse the fact that they have to surf on dolphins day in and day out. It’s the law of diminishing returns. I see it all the time in my job. You should see someone bank a million quid for the hundredth time. It’s like they barely notice. They grunt. I don’t want to be like that. Besides, Dylan, I have a family, and while you’ve told me practically nothing about you, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance you do too, no? Doing this once was innocent enough, but repeat it and we start hurting people, do we not? Not least of all ourselves?”

  Dylan nodded. She was right, of course.

  “Okay then.”

  She was dressed now. He was still naked, and now he felt it. He covered his soggy genitals with the sheet. She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Thank you, Dylan Greenyears.”

  “For what?”

  “For giving an awkward teenaged girl an outlet for her feelings. For being my first crush and, in a way, my first broken heart.”

  “That was all in your head,” he said.

  “Just like I was in yours,” she parried. She had a point.

  She slipped into her heels, leant over the bed and kissed him gently on the lips one last time. Then she went off to pick up her kids.

  Fantastic. Now he had a weekend to hang out in Baltimore. Just what he’d never wanted.

  • • •

  Within the hour, Dylan was at the Greyhound station boarding another bus, this time to Philadelphia. Since leaving Earth, he’d kept in touch with his parents on a regular basis via omni, but he hadn’t returned in the flesh even once, and while he couldn’t very well visit them now either since word would sooner or later get back to Erin (who talked to his mother more than he did), he figured he could at least spy on them a bit and make sure they were doing okay.

  For the duration of the nauseating bus ride, Dylan stared out the tinted window and reacquainted himself with his homeworld. If he squinted a little, I-95 was every bit the wide, soulless highway it had always been, but upon closer inspection, it was clear the world had changed. Countless bumper stickers shrieked “EARTH: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT,” and the infrastructure, accordingly, looked surprisingly good: no bumps or potholes marred the road, and bridges and overpasses appeared secure where not altogether new. Holographic signboards every few miles reminded drivers to carpool because, though CO2 emissions were no longer an issue, natural gas was itself a nonrenewable resource, an automotive stopgap while the industry perfected the solar fuel cell. Still, where Earthlings might have taken pride in finally being responsible stewards of their planet, there was instead a sense of defeat in the air, as if the discovery of other advanced civilizations in the galaxy had served as yet another indignity in a long line of them since Galileo informed humans that the cosmos didn’t revolve around them, and Darwin that they were less angels than apes. Society appeared to be functioning better than ever, but there was a palpable lack of ambition and creativity in the air. In its place was a whiff of surrender and pragmatism that Dylan found at once tragic and impressive; America was at last becoming life-sized. Even the religious, the ones with the fish or crescents or stars on their bumpers, appeared defeated, underzealous, with the possible exception of a pair of shirt-and-tie-wearing Mormons who biked by on a pedestrian bridge looking jaunty as ever.

  He disembarked at the Greyhound Station in Philly, that symbolic city, and went for a walk past City Hall, which looked just as it had when he and Chad used to come downtown high on youth and dreams to knock on the door of their sex-drenched futures. Atop the tower, William Penn stood sentinel still, keeping watch over the old capital from what had once been the tallest building in the world.

  How many patriots had charted their disillusion by that piss-yellow clock?

  Dylan walked, and thought, and maybe cried a little, and soon he was tripping over the cobblestones of Old City, where two and half centuries since, the “Great Experiment” had begun. Oh, the beautiful, childlike hubris of it! His heart tolled and cracked.

  He took the el to 69th Street and then a trolley from there to the suburbs, where new colors, shades of green mainly, suffused the windows by degrees. He watched with an ache in his chest as familiar landmarks zipped past in space as they had in time: the baseball diamond where he’d hit his only home run; the apartment building where his father’s father had died fat and alone; the park where he’d used to throw stones into the creek, watch the interference patterns of the rings, and think big thoughts about life (he’d been wrong on most every count).

  He got off at Brookview station, noted the absence of the pay phone where there had always been one, and then, as he had thousands of times before, walked along the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks for his mother’s sake, past the Pattersons’, the Wickershams’, the Murphys’, to the khaki-colored colonial that he still identified in the deepest parts of himself as home. He knew his American literature well enough to know you can’t really go there again, and yet...

  The ringing in his ears seemed louder than ever because otherwise it was so quiet here, the silence interrupted only by the occasional passing car, the low drone of a lawnmower off in the distance, the gurgling of the skimmers in the swimming pool he was glad to see open. He might have been here yesterday. His feet knew where to expect uneven pavement, his nostrils when to expect honeysuckle. It was dinnertime, the light warm, auburn and pink, the grass a bit shaggy and of a green deeper than he’d remembered being possible. The squirrels bounded adorably across the lawn and up the oaks, and drifting back to the branch there—oh!—a firefly, which, come to think of it, he’d have called a ‘lightning bug’ before he’d begun reading so much and losing his regional markers. In any case, on New Taiwan there was no such bug to illuminate the falling dusk like this. He’d learned in school that bioluminescence served as a defense mechanism, an organism’s way of advertising to potential predators that it tasted bitter, but if “magic” could still mean anything for adults, surely this was it. He noticed now, as he had not when he was a child, how they seemed to light up in bursts, a cluster at a time, and then none for a spell, and then another cluster. He noticed, too, how they illuminated only on their way up. It did something to your consciousness to see that—made it leap. Thirty-five years ago, he and the neighborhood kids—John, Joe, Michelle—would have been out playing now, climbing skyscraping evergreens, building worlds in John’s sandbox, and making strange forbidden potions in buckets according to very strict recipes of mud, dirt, grass, sand, gravel, dandelions, earthworms, ants, pinecones, and—
if a parent or older sibling had recently taken one of them to the park on the other side of the tracks—skunk cabbage.

  Where were all the kids now? Grown and for one reason or other not replaced. On other worlds perhaps.

  He slinked from tree to tree and peered in at the windows. His father appeared first, hobbling across the kitchen, carrying a tray of something with his arthritic fingers. And there now was his mother at the table, reading a hard copy of the newspaper. He’d watched them advance in years via omni, but it was different to see them at home like this. They had new lines in their faces, new maps of time. Life expectancy was getting longer every year, but there was still a very good chance they would not live forever.23

  23_____________

  The new scanning technology brought up all sorts of new questions regarding life extension too. For instance, if a patient presented pancreatic cancer and required a risky surgery, doctors might, theoretically, make multiple copies of the patient and operate on each one successively, disintegrating the failures until they met with success. Given this, all surgeries that had been shown to work even just once might be advertised as one hundred percent effective. The Mons Olympus Accord on the Reproductive and Reduplicative Rights of Human Persons had outlawed this theoretical practice, however, and took care as well to cover, in painful legalese, any other clever uses of scanning technology that the framers might not have specifically foreseen. With the exception of astronauts on long-term exogalactic missions, substrate-independent mind downloads were also banned by the accord amid great controversy. Digital avatars, however, had become a common way of kinda-sorta extending one’s life indefinitely for the sake of the kids, grandkids, and anyone else who might care to see you not die. There were a number of competing models on the market, but all were variations on the same idea: simulate a human being in a computer using photographs, speech recordings, videos, and a personality profile determined on the basis of a lengthy questionnaire filled out by the original (in extremis) and/or the family. Some families even elected to have their loved one’s avatar embodied in an AI, which these days could be alarmingly lifelike, and while there had been a panel discussion at Mons Olympus about the long-term hazards of avatar-droids, the consensus seemed to be that this was a very different, and much less dire and philosophically vexed, discussion than the scanning and cloning discussions that had taken place earlier in the week.