Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  “You know what you need, Pops?” Danny drops his board into the surf. “Let go and hang loose. Learn to surf. I’m just the fellow to teach you.”

  Merullo’s fists clench. “Maybe this Vee-Reel isn’t what it appears to be. Maybe none of you are constructs. That radio signal from Triton—”

  Danny snaps his fingers and juts out his hip and launches into “Dig Those Waves,” another teen anthem—fast, breezy, easy to shake your hips to—with Bonnie singing backup and the rest of us pitching in on the chorus, and an unseen band providing the accompaniment. Everyone on the beach is bopping and twirling and shimmying, and for two perfect minutes all the world is young and in love, and the endless summer reaches the pinnacle of perfect happiness.

  While we’re singing, Merullo walks away.

  Bonnie and Danny quarrel. She wants an engagement ring. He thinks that they have their whole lives ahead of them, so what’s the rush? Merullo overhears part of it. They are so young, he wants to say. So naïve. He wonders if he’s ever been married, if he’s ever been in love. Life outside the Vee-Reel is slip, slip, slipping away. Later he finds Bonnie sitting alone on the beach, building a lopsided sandcastle.

  “I was never very good at this,” she admits. “The tower always falls over, or the moat caves in.”

  Merullo sits and starts helping her. The sand is warm and gritty, and gets under his fingernails. “I heard you fighting with Danny.”

  “He thinks we have forever. I think forever’s over before you know it.”

  Out in the water, five dolphins breach the surface and quickly curve under again. Danny and the others are out bobbing in the lineup, but they are indistinct, fuzzy. The sunlight is very bright. Merullo thinks of Mark Jenny, and then dumps more sand into the pail.

  “When you wake up and leave the program, could you take me with you?” Bonnie’s expression is suddenly shy. “I think seeing a real-live spaceship would be groovy. There’s an astronaut club at school, but they don’t let girls join.”

  “This is where you belong, Bonnie.”

  “This isn’t a place.” Bonnie lifts her head and looks out toward the ocean. “It’s just a stopover on the way to something bigger. Don’t those movies of yours have endings?”

  Indeed they do. First there will be climax of sorts. It might be a zany motorcycle chase, with Danny and chums capturing the bad guys who never posed much of a threat anyway. Or maybe a skydiving sequence, or dance marathon, or some other test of young adulthood. Then there will be a luau full of singing and dancing, one last hurrah of summer, before the credits roll.

  “So maybe your ending is coming.” Bonnie rests her soft hand on his. “Or maybe this whole thing will just start over. Do you know what’s going to happen?”

  Merullo squeezes her hand. “I don’t know much of anything, anymore.”

  Rival surfers from another beach challenge Danny to a surf contest. Merullo watches the action from the high rocks near the water. Some of the contestants look like his crew—a Japanese man doing a handstand on a rushing board, a dark-skinned woman on the shoulders of a man Merullo’s age. Some others look like his family, or friends long gone. Their names are lost to him. The outside world is so far away now that he might never get it back. He needs something to hold on to.

  “My suit,” he says to Violet, who has come to stand beside him. “It’s the only proof I have.”

  “Proof of what?” Violet asks.

  He’s already sprinted past her, heading for the beach house. When he gets there, the bathroom clothesline holds only wet underwear and damp socks.

  “Where is it?” Merullo demands.

  “I don’t know,” Violet says.

  Lunkhead comes out of the kitchen, munching on a bag of potato chips. “Lose something?”

  Merullo overturns mattresses and empties duffel bags. He digs through closets and cabinets. Over at Sammy’s Pavilion, where tiki torches flicker under the sunset sky, Bonnie and Danny are dancing check to cheek in the middle of the crowd. Becky Clark and Tommy Suede eventually grew up, grew old and died, but these two will be young forever.

  Merullo grabs Danny’s arm. “Where is it?”

  “Where’s what, Pops?” Danny asks.

  “My goddamn spacesuit! What have you done with it?”

  Nobody uses profanity on the beach. The music dies off and the dancing stops.

  Merullo turns in a circle, challenging us all with outstretched hands. “Who are you? You brought me here, you trapped me, you won’t let me leave—”

  His voice cracks and fades. We shake our heads.

  Danny steps toward him. “You can’t leave because you won’t let yourself. Because you haven’t finished what you came here to do.”

  Bonnie’s voice is just as compassionate and sympathetic as Danny’s. “Look at the water, Colonel.”

  Five seagulls lay at the border of water and land, the wind ruffling the stiff feathers of their corpses.

  “No.” Merullo’s legs fold under him and he lands on his knees. His eyes are wet. “Don’t you understand? I’m in charge. I have a crew and ship to keep safe. We’re on our way to Triton . . . ”

  The seagulls fade into the sand. Where guys and gals once stood, there are only faint indentations in the sand. Sammy’s Pavilion is gone, and empty beach blankets billow toward a sky that has gone silver-white. But the rolling blue ocean remain constant, and Our hand is warm on Merullo’s shoulder.

  “Let go and hang loose,” we tell him. “Surf’s up.”

  “There was an alien radio message,” Merullo insists.

  “No. There was a malfunction on your Voyager craft. It detected and reported a distorted version of its own transmissions. That was all.”

  In the lineup, the water is flat and calm. We help him sit up and say, “When the wave comes, lay down and start paddling toward the beach as hard as you can while leaning forward. If you lean back, that’ll just slow you down. But also keep your chest raised.”

  Merullo’s fists tighten. “What happened to my ship?”

  “An accident. It could no longer support you.” We ruffle his thinning hair. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  The water rises. We help Merullo to paddle toward the shore, pull himself upright, and stand low with his gaze held high. There’s no blue screen backdrop or Vee-Reel special effect for this ride. Physics and balance rule the world. We’re riding the perfect wave across the cosmos of time and memory, through the heart of a crippled spaceship and the five corpses secreted aboard, and toward the speck of beach that has always been nothing more than a temporary accumulation of sand and sorrow. The sun burns away all regret. The salty water lifts us up and makes us sing.

  Merullo sees Mark Jenny standing on the shore.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Mark says, as Merullo emerges from the surf. Mark’s suntanned face crinkles with affection, but there is concern there as well. “Where have you been?”

  “Letting go. Hanging loose.” Merullo has a wild grin on his face. He cups Mark’s face with his strong, wet hands. “I’m sorry I never told you.”

  Mark smiles. “You don’t think I knew?”

  The story, as with every beach movie, ends with a kiss.

  About the Author

  Sandra McDonald recently won a Silver Moonbeam award in Children’s Literature for her GLBTQ novel Mystery of the Tempest. She is the author of several novels, several dozen short stories, and the award-winning collection Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories.

  The Association of the Dead

  Rahul Kanakia

  The neon logic clusters cascaded through the extremities of Sumith’s perception as he sang sweet Code through the room, through the house, and out into the massed congregations of networked singers across the world.

  The Code had tripped another threshold. Or so he’d been told. He’d long ago abandoned the ranks of dilettantes who stood back from the effort and sipped chemical so they could dream up fancy metaphors to describe the glorious totality of
the Code. Now he sang the Code. He sang the Code in his sleep, and paused only a moment after waking before plunging in again. He sang it while he ate, and he sang it while he—

  His home muted the orchestra of Code a moment before the rock crashed through his window, sprinkling his living room with pebbles of safe-shatter glass. A bleeding body, its clothes bloody and torn, slithered through his window. The face turned towards him. The pale whites of its eyes were highlighted by the dirt and dried gore caked on the face, the rust-colored bloodstains around its mouth. The face and the mouth were exact replicas of Sumith’s own . . . as exact as a molecular extruder could make them.

  “Lowercase?” Sumith said, still shaking the song from his head. “Lowercase, is that you? Not here. I told you. I warned you.”

  “Braiiinnns,” sumith said. “Braaaaiiiinnns.”

  “Hai Ram. This again?” Sumith said. “Please, Lowercase, you need to stop this zombie bullshit. It’s fine that you decided to tune out. And I told you I’d help you if I could. But I’m singing the Code right now. Why don’t you bother Drona? Aren’t you staying with him?”

  “Braaaaiiiiiiinnnns?” the mouth said. It hawked and coughed for a moment, then spit a stream of blood and mucous, spattering Sumith and the cornflakes the House had just extruded for Sumith’s breakfast.

  “I’m hungry,” sumith said. “Very hungry. Drona said he couldn’t afford to lose the karma another resurrection would take out of him. His symphony is about to air, and someone with his karma-level can barely draw any ears as it is.”

  Sumith glanced at the loaded shotgun propped against the table. He’d extruded it after sumith had started to get a little . . . wild.

  “So you figured that good old Uppercase is always amenable to a karma hit?”

  “Come on,” sumith said. “You promised. Right before you flashed yourself you promised yourself that if you got really hungry you’d let yourself eat yourself. You know all this extruded food does for me is make me shit bricks, you know that!”

  Extruded food was electrolytically balanced to power the medical nanobodies in the blood—its calories weren’t useable by someone with nonfunctional implants. But that wasn’t Sumith’s fault . . . or, not really, anyway . . .

  “I was depressed. I was getting nowhere with the Code,” Sumith said. “But now, they’ve upgraded my access! You can’t hold me to that. You’re dead, promises to the dead don’t count. And promises to yourself especially don’t count.”

  “Braaaaaiiinnns,” sumith said. He staggered towards his reincarnation.

  Sumith raised the shotgun lying by his kitchen table, and was about to unload both barrels into his old, discarded, body, when another set of hands grabbed him from behind.

  sumith sprang. And as sumith’s teeth clamped around his reincarnation’s jugular, Sumith remembered. Dammit, Drona’s symphony had aired yesterday. He hadn’t listened. No one had.

  “Can’t we . . . cook it?” Drona said. Sumith’s body was lying cracked open on the counter, and sumith was grabbing smelly, greasy intestine by the armful.

  sumith said, “Eat up before his nanobodies shut down. You’ll get sick if bacteria are allowed to grow.”

  “I have his house codes,” Drona said. That was how he’d gotten in, after all. “I can make the ovens work . . . ”

  sumith sighed and wiped his bloody hands on his trousers. He reached for the greasy plastisealed pack hanging from his frayed leather belt and pulled a corroded cylinder from the bag.

  Drona said: “Wait, not yet. I said I wanted to try—”

  The EMP-gun, painstakingly pieced together by hand from scraps sumith had scavenged out of old-Mumbai, was the one machine that still hummed to life when he flicked the switch. It wasn’t stamped from nanites, like everything that came out of the extruders. It didn’t care about karma or implants—it gave its beautiful hum to anyone who asked. Sometimes sumith was tempted to sleep with it vibrating under his pillow. He pointed it at Drona, who was backed against a stove that had lit up for use in his proximity. sumith fired. There was a bright flash, and then the stove went out. All the lights in the house went dark. The windows and doors slammed shut and locked once the House realized that there was no longer a living person inside.

  drona half-crumpled, dazed at the silence from his fried implants, at the perpetual low-level stream of information shutting down for the first time in his life.

  “Now you’re dead,” sumith said. “So eat up.”

  The westerner whose face was being projected onto the inside of Sumith’s eyelids sighed an incomprehensible sigh. Sumith didn’t think he was being at all unreasonable.

  “It’s been over a week since my last memory. This reincarnation-delay is bullshit,” Sumith said.

  “People dropping like flies out there. Doctorow knows we got a huge backlog; and we’ve done as He decreed. Your reputation—ahem, karma—is low, so you had to wait. We’re only human you know. You want faster service, maybe you all out there better work harder on that AI of yours.”

  “The Code! Do you know what a week means? That’s an entire generation of progress. I’ll be out of date. Out of tune. Obsolete. Who’s going to compensate me for the karma I’ll lose?”

  “Not me,” the American said. “Thanks for choosing Phoenix for your reincarnation needs.” He disappeared. Clearly he had nothing to fear from Sumith’s disapproval. Sumith didn’t have enough karma for his anger, radiating outwards through his network of friends and followers, to do any appreciable damage to the reputation of someone so far away.

  Sumith breathed deeply and opened his eyes. He was lying horizontally inside a cheap plywood box. The dim coffin-light illuminated the inside of the lid, just a few centimeters from his face. Well, a week or not, he would be home in just a few minutes. He rooted around by his feet, found the dhoti, and wrapped it around his midsection, then slipped his feet into the chapals. Hopefully sumith and drona would have given up this idiocy by now.

  He keyed open the lock of the coffin and pushed the lid outwards. The air filled with the song of Code as his house, sensing his presence, whirred to life in front of him. The house’s front door slid open, and a fresh pair of sandals was lying just ins—

  sumith’s face poked over the lip of the coffin. “Brains?” he said. Sumith kicked out at the hands that grabbed at his limbs and throat, but there were too many.

  sumith and drona were reclining in Sumith’s living room. Without a living person inside to activate the passive utilities—like the air conditioning—the heat was sweltering. But the diamond-hard walls of the house protected them from the occasional bullets being fired out of the passing cars and trucks. Sated, sumith and drona didn’t bother trying to harvest the ineffectual vigilantes for food.

  Within moments of the kill a crowd of the dead had gathered around Sumith’s body, tearing at his flesh with whatever rusty scraps they’d fashioned into blades and carrying away the meal as sumith gnawed at the thick, tender right calf. The EMP gun had been taken from him late one night as he slept, and a rampage of death had swept their block. But the thieves had to bring it back for repair when it became coated with blood and sweat, and now no one dared challenge sumith’s pre-eminence, and his right to first pickings.

  “Shit,” sumith said, sitting up. “chaudhuri ran off with Uppercase’s skull. Did you extract Sumith’s body tag?”

  “Yeah, I just dropped it through his house’s slot,” drona said.

  “Good. Good. No need for unnecessary delays in his/my/our return. After I flashed myself, it took ages for me to get here on account of my useless fried tags still being in my head.”

  “Maybe next time we should flash Sumith, just give him a good flashing. Then there’d be two of you!”

  “If we’re ever set for food, maybe we will. We’d need a new typographical convention for him, though.”

  “What about sumith[?]” drona said. “See how I’m raising my pitch at the end of the word? Like it’s a question? And you can do it to anythi
ng?”

  “Hey,” sumith said. “Yeah. Yeah? I like it. Hey, he/thou/you should be getting here soon. I’ve never tasted Drona before.”

  “I wonder what a lowercase would taste like? Would it all be the same? Or would it be like an uppercase squared?”

  sumith slapped drona. “Don’t even joke about that! A lowercase can’t reincarnate. Killing one of us would be murder.”

  “A month? Really?” Sumith said. “Do you even have enough karma left to post on a message board?”

  “You’re one to talk,” said the westerner. “Thanks for choosing Phoenix for your reincarnation needs.” He ended the call.

  What? Dammit, Sumith’s karma was in the toilet. Epically low. What the hell had happened? There were pictures of his face, blood spilling from his open mouth, slathered all over his profile. His status alerts, uncleared these many weeks, had piled up, terabytes worth. They were blaming him for what Lowercase had done; blaming him for all the dead.

  Couldn’t they understand that he’d been depressed back then? He’d just made the EMP-gun for a joke. He’d been getting nowhere with the Code, and he thought maybe—maybe there was some way out.

  Loud bangs rattled the coffin. “Uppercase,” a voice yelled. “Come on out. We’re not gonna eat you this time.”

  Sumith closed his eyes again and tried to re-establish contact with the reincarnation center. “I need a real person!” he said, trying to cut through the automated menus.

  “Due to unexpectedly high volume of requests, all our licensed counselors are busy at this time. Your request will be attended to in order of priority.”

  Shit, with his karma, his priority had to be hovering right around next year. Maybe he could at least tell them to put him inside the house. Or leave him at the port. Or just supply him with a gun.

  “I need to alter my arrangements,” he said. One of his consumer-alert heuristics hijacked his vision. Warning, it said. Contract has been marked as a reputational risk. Any alterations will provide grounds for termination.