“Sure, you could go back to an earlier event. But you won’t remember this, because if the garbage demolecularizer never malfunctions, then Dr. Granger never recommends immersion therapy and you never learn any of this. And if you don’t remember it, then you’ll make the same observations and choices you did before, and therefore demolecularizer will malfunction anyway, just as it already has. You’ll come back here, we’ll have the same stupid conversation and you’ll decide the same thing, causing a feedback loop.”
Alex was somewhat nettled at being yelled at. He wasn’t an idiot. Dying was disorienting. Well, was he God of his iteration or wasn’t he?
“Oh what do you know,” he scowled, “If I made the rules, then obviously I can break them.”
“It’s too late. Your expectations of how the world is supposed to work are too set. You won’t be able to change them. You might pretend that you can, but your mind will betray you. You’ll never really believe. It’ll be like a magic trick, intriguing but something you know isn’t real. The world— matter, events, time, will behave according to your actual belief, not to what you wish is true. That’s one of the reasons fresh iterations must be started without any memory of this— staircase room or of other iterations. If you try it, Dr. Granger will just think you’re truly mad and lock you up. And in a world like yours, it may be centuries before you have another opportunity to die,” The Alex-God-thing warned.
“You’re just a construct,” sneered Alex, “I’m the real one, I’m the original. I’m master of my own mind, just because you can’t figure out how to change things, doesn’t mean that I can’t. You’ll see!” He snapped his fingers, and the room reverted to the staircases again. He ran up the steps to the next door and flung it open. He could see his body below him on the gurney and the doctors scrambling around him. Alex dove in.
“Stubborn fool,” The Alex-God-thing thought.
* * *
Alex woke up to a red-faced doctor thumping him in the chest. He groaned to make the doctor stop. Dr. Granger’s face appeared above him. “What the hell were you thinking?” screamed the psychiatrist, “You could have died.”
“That was the point, doctor,” gasped Alex, rubbing his sternum to make it stop aching.
“I meant for real,” spat Dr. Granger, “and to chase a delusion—”
“It wasn’t a delusion. I’ll prove it. I’ll— I’ll stop time. Let me see your watch.”
Dr. Granger shook his head. “I’m not indulging this fantasy, Alex.”
“Let me just—” Alex tried to grab Dr. Granger’s wrist, but found his arms and legs were bound to the gurney again.
“I had to put you on suicide watch,” said Dr. Granger. “What did you expect to happen?”
“I wasn’t committing suicide,” protested Alex, “It’s your therapy.”
“I take full responsibility for your irrational behavior. I pushed too hard. And now I need to take precautions for your safety.”
“My safe— no doctor, you don’t understand. I’ll show you. It’ll clear the whole thing up.” He shut his eyes and concentrated. “Watch the clock,” he said. There was a long moment of utter silence. He willed the clock to slow down, to tick back, just one second.
“What am I watching for?” asked Dr. Granger.
“Just wait for it,” said Alex, still with his eyes shut. Believe, believe, believe, he urged himself.
“Why is this so important to you?” asked the doctor, watching him.
“Because I matter. I’m significant. You’ll believe me when you see what I can do.”
Dr. Granger shook his head. “I think we’ve wasted enough time here. Let’s get you to the hospital.”
“No,” cried Alex, “Just give me a minute. I’ll show you— I matter.” The nurse began rolling the gurney away from Dr. Granger toward the elevator. Alex struggled to turn his head toward the psychiatrist. “I matter, I’m unique. There’s only one Alex. Only me. You wouldn’t exist without me!” he screamed.
The staircase carpeted itself with a long red runner and Alex blinked in again, halfway up the stairs. He sagged and then sat down on a step. “What’s with the carpet?” he asked.
“Means you snuffed it for real this time. I have to say, I wasn’t sure that’d happen with this iteration. It means the world had a specific beginning and a specific end. You can go back and experience everything again. Or bits of it. However you like. But it’s like a movie. The events are all done, the choices decided. The experiment is over.”
Alex nodded. “You were right, by the way.”
The Alex-God-thing nodded. “I know. How’d you finally get free?”
“I didn’t. There was a conflict. The Infant Wars. Since nobody died, no one was allowed to be born. But people still were, in secret. The world’s governing body found themselves fighting a terrible, unending war against the Childbearers. Everyone that died was just revived and told to go on fighting. Eventually someone came up with a weapon that wiped out the cortical backup systems and the organic printers. When people died, they stayed dead. And the war ended. The survivors agreed to destroy the weapon once they’d culled the entire population of anyone deemed undesirable to make room for new, better babies. Of course, being mad…” Alex shrugged. “What happens to the world now? Uh— the iteration, I mean. The people in it?”
The Alex-God-thing shook his head. “There’s no machine without a God in it,” he said sadly. “It’s gone. You lost space and time, remember?”
“So that’s it? All those people just— just aren’t?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been able to find out. Maybe they are lost too. Or maybe they have their own staircase room and their iterations only overlap with ours where our expectations are the same, where our will for shaping what exists, matches. Maybe they have doors before ours. Or staircases that continue after ours is finished.”
“What happens to me? Do I keep rewatching the same tired life for eternity? Do I disappear into you? Do I try a different iteration?”
The Alex-God-thing frowned. “What do you want to happen to you? You seemed to want approval last time. Some kind of judgment of your performance. Do you want the whole white light, celestial trumpets, heaven thing? Would that make you happy? Cause I think…” he snapped his fingers and the staircases smoothed down into a large map. “Yeah, that’s way over there, in the northern quadrant,” he pointed to a vague drawing of blue that was almost out of sight.
Alex shook his head. “I just want to know that it mattered. That it meant something.”
The Alex-God-thing sat down beside him. “It meant something. I wouldn’t be here without you. It would matter to me if you never existed,” he said. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“But you said there were thousands, millions of iterations. And if they all have an Alex in them, then what do I matter?”
“There are infinite iterations. Maybe infinite Alexes or maybe there’s only you hopping between iterations. But, no matter which, I still need you to make me. You were right too, when you said I was just a construct that you created. I am as you expected me to be. In the grand scheme of Alexhood, you might be infinitesimal, but without you, the whole thing collapses.”
“Yeah, but you could say that about any of the Alexes,” he grumbled and scuffed the carpet with his foot.
The Alex-God-thing smiled. “That’s true, but I’ll tell you a secret if you promise not to tell the others. I like you best.”
Alex laughed. “I bet you say that to all the Alexes,” he said.
A Word from Deirdre Gould
The reason I love science fiction is that it lends itself to big questions and big ideas. One day, I might read a long, engrossing novel on the dangers of using new technologies recklessly and on the next, I might read a short story about a utopia built on the back of the same technology. Science fiction tackles social issues like equality, ethics, or free will by mirroring our society back to us. It also illuminates our deepest personal unknowns like wh
y are we here? What are we truly capable of? What are our limits as human beings? Or, as in Iteration, what happens to our consciousness when we die?
In science fiction we get to explore places and times and ideas that are impossible for us to physically visit (just yet), just by engaging our imaginations with what we know about life. Science fiction literature doesn’t have all the answers. Maybe it doesn’t have any of the answers to these questions, but that’s okay. It’s already done its biggest job, which is to get us to start thinking about, and figuring out those answers for ourselves.
Deirdre Gould lives in Central Maine with her three children and husband. She’s also resided in northern Idaho, coastal Virginia and central Pennsylvania, but all of them just led her back home. The winters sure are cold, but that just means the zombies run slower. The area is isolated, but that just means the apocalyptic diseases don’t spread as quickly. And the storms are bad enough that no one thinks you’re crazy for "prepping." It’s kind of ideal for a post-apocalypse writer when you think about it.
To keep up with her After the Cure series, join her mailing list to get the latest announcements, special offers and free stories
http://www.scullerytales.com/?page_id=96
Green Gifts
by Nick Webb
MARTIN GLANCED UP. Nothing, he thought. There’s nothing here, and nobody talking to me. Not that he particularly minded the idea of some company. But normally he did prefer to know who he was talking to.
That was the thing about this post. It was so damn far. Far from home, far from family; hell, it was a three-day drive in the crawltrail just to reach Rionegro to stock up on supplies at the local market (which was really just a shed attached to the bar). “Town” was probably stretching things. From what he’d seen, the bar came first, and a few diehards had decided to just settle on down right next door rather than hike or drive or fly or whatever it was they did to cross the miles of densely wooded terrain out here in the Belenite wilds.
The wind outside the observation deck whistled sharply as it picked up speed, blowing clouds of teal dust across the glass and coating the tower in a chalky white residue, evidence of the ongoing pollination efforts underway in the woods below. Martin shook his head, trying to focus on the data recorder lying crosswise on his lap.
Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen… He counted under his breath. He held an advanced degree in xenobiology from one of the most prestigious universities in this sector of the Empire, and here he was, surveying the same five kilometers day in and day out. It was, in his opinion, a job that could just as easily have been done by old Nico, who was, as far as Martin could tell, a permanent fixture on the third stool from the left at the Rionegro bar. Except old Nico is blind, Martin thought, Not that it actually matters much in this shithole of a—
TAKE TO ME!
Martin startled at the shout, which reverberated against his superior temporal gyrus with a fierce insistence. He fumbled with the data recorder, looking for something, anything, to indicate that it had registered the silvery voice that had cut through his conscious thoughts and left him with a dull ache above his left ear. If it weren’t for the physical evidence of his own bodily pain, Martin might assume that he was hallucinating the whole thing; out here alone with his repetitive, mind-numbing task, perhaps he was slowly dripping down the drain of boredom, or insanity.
Unless he was hallucinating the pain too. Some sort of psychosomatic response to the unending lines of flora and fauna that he knew he ought to be more excited about, given his training and the fact that they were utterly unique in the known Empire, actual native species on a terraformed duplicate that ought to contain only the original pattern, that of Old Earth. It was mind-boggling, career-making, and he was absolutely forbidden to publish anything, any hint of anything, by those secretive, isolationist bastards lining the senate halls back in Nuevoaire, with their ornamental knives and their ridiculous gaucho pants straining against their bureaucratic corpulence—
TAKE TO ME!
Searing pain shot through his skull. He turned, half-bent in agony, his hands feeling for the ancient leather chair as his vision blurred against the cutting edge of the insistent command.
It was going to be a long evening. Just him and his particularly unpleasant psychosomatic symptom. What the hell did it even mean, anyway? “Take to me.” Stupid subconscious. Couldn’t even hallucinate properly out here.
TAKE TO—
Martin slumped, welcoming the dark relief of unconsciousness before the voice could finish its inane command.
* * *
The afternoon Belenite sun beat down against the brown earth. Carla scuffed her feet against the gravel, slowing her swing so she could jump off. She waved frenetically at her mother, who was on the vidcom again, talking with Carla’s grandma, which meant that she would be really busy for a long time. Carla had seen it before.
She sighed. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her grandma, or her mother, but every once in a while it would be nice if her mom would actually play with her when they came to the park. She had tried talking to the small cluster of kids over by the climbing wall, but her had words come out all muddled, her tongue tripping and stumbling, and the kids had stared at her blankly before returning to their game. Something about running a store and selling food. Something you had to talk to do. She knew she sounded dumb. She always sounded dumb. Which sucked, because she wasn’t. She read everything she could find, even those archaic Earth classics everyone else complained about. She liked the sound of their fancy words in her head. Gave her something fun to think about when the only thing coming out of her mouth was a stuttering gasp.
Her dad had told her to stop trying so hard, to just relax. Just breathe, sweetie. That’s right. In-two-three-four and hold-two-three-four and out-two-three-four. Good. See?
Alone and silent, Carla settled herself against the trunk of a large tree. It was so big she couldn’t even put her arms around it. She wondered how long it had stood here, growing bigger and bigger. Maybe it was really old. Like, maybe it was original old.
Carla knew from her teachers at school that life here on Belen was, relatively speaking, somewhat new. It didn’t seem new, not with big ancient trees growing in the parks, but Belen itself had only been settled 276 years ago. It was one of the first. One of the original planets the humans on Old Earth had found, ready and waiting to receive the colonists who spilled out across the universe, relieving Earth of a litany of torturous problems: overpopulation, overpollution, overterraformation, over-everything, it sounded like.
So, old for Belen was still new for the universe. But that was really hard to think about. Especially when one hadn’t been traveling out in the Empire like some of the other kids at school. Those really snobby ones who rubbed it in that they had been “out there” and “seen things.” When you had only ever been on Belen, a giant tree possibly planted by the original colonists seemed really old, and possibly special.
Carla closed her eyes. The knobbly roots rising from the ground pressed against her back and legs. She could hear her mom, still chattering away on the vidcom with Grandma. Something about a recipe for chicken and dumplings that was supposed to be “really authentic,” according to the conversation.
hide
Carla stiffened. She opened her eyes and looked around. No one was there. She glanced up, trying to see if one of the kids had decided to climb the tree to tease her by whispering down from above, but the branches were empty.
hide
There it was again. A soft voice, plinking like summer rain against a corrugated tin roof, with a gentle, corrosive bite. Who was telling her to hide? And why?
Carla rubbed her head. She could feel a headache coming on, and she hated headaches. She always got them after her visit to the medcenter, where she worked with her speech therapist. Lots of exercises involving placing her tongue here, then there, against her teeth and then down again, and swallowing with the tip pressed just so, so that she didn’t accidentally
spit or slur her words. She envied the easy speech of her peers. For Carla, crafting a sentence took careful planning, practice even, to get the words out clearly, and in the right order. It was like a dance. A really tiny, annoying dance she had to do that only took place in her mouth.
hide
She knew what she was hearing. Hearing, listening—these were things Carla excelled at. She did them all the time. Forget her treacherous tongue; she could always trust her ears.
So she got up, hitched up her shorts, and walked off into the woods at the edge of the park.
* * *
Arthritis stiffened Papito’s fingers. It always acted up when he sat outside in the garden, probably something to do with the rich humidity that descended upon Belen as winter receded. Better to sit out in the garden, fingers, wrists, and knees complaining, then to be stuck back inside in the common room. The place stank. Too many old people, not enough windows. Okay, there were windows. But that new head nurse, the one from the Imperial Medical Research Facility that had opened in Nuevoaire several years back, she had really taken that Imperial bullshit to heart. He wasn’t sure what said Imperial bullshit was, exactly, but it seemed to have something to do with keeping the windows closed at the care homes. Because she refused to let them open Papito’s window.
So he left. Every day he left his room, his vidcom, and his tScreen—which, according to them, should have provided him with all necessary familial connections and conversations, as well as any needed mental stimulation, through a variety of games and age-appropriate (ha!) activities—and went out.
He liked it out in the garden. It wasn’t crowded. That pretty much summed it up. After his retirement from the Belenite Air Guard, it had taken him only one month with his feet planted firmly on the ground to realize that the only reason he’d been able to make it as far as he had in his life was that he’d spent the majority of his time away: away from his wife, his kids, their kids. Turns out he was a singularly solitary old bastard, one whom everyone preferred in relatively small doses, ideally once or twice a month. The feeling was mutual.
Future Chronicles Special Edition Page 19
