Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 98

by Matthew Kressel

  Another story is that SZ had a twenty-year relationship with a youngster. The girl was only eleven at the beginning, and by the end, the dreaming man was sleeping with her as well as his various daughters.

  That is the kind of story told by enemies and believed by only a few of them. Yet from what is known, pedophilia is unlikely but never impossible.

  A third version exists. There was a large Christmas party where SZ had one drink too many and then confided to the wrong person. He claimed that the woman he loved for twenty-one imaginary years was as exotic and beautiful as any woman could be. But there was more than just that one woman in the other realm. He had lived inside a fully realized world, sharp and honest. A man who had never built anything with his hands built the house where he and his common-law wife lived together. They had several children. SZ mentioned names and grieved that he didn’t have pictures of their little ones. He was that proud of them. Actual specifics were few, but the witness had the impression that this nonexistent mother and family lived in another age, perhaps inside a fantasy world—a world of grand beauty where everybody shared a crushing, relentless poverty.

  SZ’s wife filed for divorce shortly after New Year’s.

  He didn’t contest her when she took their three children.

  Rumors of depression seem to be untrue, but those same rumors led to talk about removing him from his post. SZ didn’t give anyone that chance. He resigned on a Friday afternoon, slipping out of his office and then out of the country. The last credible sighting came from the border of Uganda and South Sudan. A white man matching SZ’s description was seen walking alone into the bush, wearing tattered clothes and an enormous smile that washed away his miserable circumstances.

  Certain categories make easy statistics, and perhaps these numbers have real significance.

  But statistics are a game for bolder souls than ours.

  Yes, there has been a strong rise in separations and divorces. The largest upticks come from males married for seven to twelve years and whose spouses weren’t affected. And inside that group, the most susceptible are young men who experienced only a year or two of pernicious romance. (PR is the latest term for the condition. Will it last? Who knows?) Perhaps this says something about human nature. You spend two years with the girl of your dreams, and that’s both too long and too short. Coming back into the old world, you look at your legal mate as an embarrassment or disappointment, or boring. Because your dream mate and you were still fresh to each other, and everything ended too soon.

  Couples that collapsed together are less likely to divorce. Though their numbers are still higher than normal, and substantially so.

  Older couples are most resilient.

  Indeed, if a husband and wife fell into a stupor for just a few hours, and if they woke at nearly the same time, they often use the event as a bonding agent, revitalizing marriages that perhaps weren’t as strong as they might have been.

  Books are being written on the psychological effects.

  Careers and entire new industries are being nourished.

  One category that receives remarkably little attention: The effects on children and young teenagers. From what has been observed, young children always experienced a love affair, but non-sexual and with a parental figure. In their dream, some disaster had swept away life as they knew it, and they found an adoptive adult who led them through a series of great adventures, sometimes spanning decades of life and growth.

  Those children are as profoundly changed as anyone. “Baby adults,” they have been dubbed by observers and the occasional news feature.

  And what other changes have been wrought?

  Today, several thousand patients remain scattered in various facilities. They demand an expensive level of care, and if they don’t wake in the next few months, their bodies will require new and aggressive interventions. And there are the social ramifications to a world making ready for the next attack—even if the first attack wasn’t terroristic in nature. The health industry is devising huge, largely unworkable plans in case crowds and entire cities are rendered helpless. Billions are being spent on facilities that will wait in stasis for the next wave of casualties, giving us the chance to study them in detail. And there is the simple, relentless problem that comes from one difficult evening in October: Tens of thousands of people are awake today, dealing with lives that were never lived, and from all accounts those other lives seem to be as genuine and as thoroughly recalled as any.

  How can so much human experience, sitting outside normal life, not have a significant impact on all of us?

  What ideas did our neighbors and friends bring back from the other world?

  And how will the echo of romance play, now and for the next thousand years?

  Case study:

  EL is a physical therapy major and a member of the football trainer’s corp. That’s why she was standing near the twenty-five-yard line, fully exposed to the blast. Among her peers, EL has various distinctions. As a patient, she was cared for at home by her mother and stepfather. That wasn’t particularly unusual. There was a rampant shortage of hospital beds, particularly in those first three months, and many families took up the burden. But EL was a different kind of patient. Everyone had elevated breathing rates, but she was at the high end of the continuum. Perhaps youth and physical fitness made that possible. Or there were random or unknown factors. What is known is that she spent seventeen weeks in her own bed, cared for by people who had the resources and energy to meet her extraordinary needs. EL sounded like a sprinter when she breathed. Her mouth and nostrils became chapped, and she lost weight despite constant feedings through IVs, and later, tubes pushed down her throat. Twenty pounds evaporated from a frame that didn’t enter that state overweight, and just before she woke, EL’s mother was considering transferring her to an expensive care facility.

  But her daughter woke before she starved. Perhaps because her body was suffering, it has been suggested. But only a handful of cases resemble hers, and those patients emerged long before the body failed.

  Another distinction is that EL is easily the most forthcoming about her case. She began blogging immediately. The wasted body wouldn’t let her sit up, but she wrote her first entries on her back, on a tablet held by her dutiful mother.

  One might expect that her seventeen weeks would translate to an impressive stretch of illusionary years. But that isn’t the case at all. EL felt that only nine years had passed, which again puts her at the tip of a bell curve. And where most dream lovers were idealized, hers seems to have been a more fully rounded individual.

  Heather was the lover’s name.

  Is her name.

  She was an older woman, beautiful and possessive and sometimes cruel, at least in an emotional sense. EL writes that she and Heather fought often and about every possible topic. They lived together for seven years, off and on. EL was working as a trainer for the Minnesota Vikings, and her lover held and lost an assortment of jobs.

  In her blogs, EL duplicates long stretches of dialogue.

  Of course their authenticity can’t be determined. But EL’s words match the tone and vocabulary that she prefers, and her lover is nothing if not consistent.

  EL loved Heather despite or because of the flaws.

  She loves her now.

  This is perhaps the most intriguing and potentially disturbing part of this case: Awake again, EL is using every spare moment of her life to explain what happened to her inside a dream. And she claims that she does this because Heather is real, and Heather returned to this world with her. There is a second mind, vivid and pissed, smoldering inside a bored skull.

  Subsequent PET scans have shown interesting abnormalities.

  And EL still consumes more food than before, feeding a mind that insists on running faster than average.

  Everyone with an interest in the outcome is watching, wondering if and how the parasite will try to take hold of its host.

  Speculation is easy, and done properly, calm speculat
ion might help our adaptations to the ongoing challenges.

  But we continue to dismiss the terrorism theory, and for good reasons. What political movement has the requisite technical skills? Whatever the device’s source, it was a high-end technology wielding powers born out of the most rarefied strata of theory, and these tools were used in a very unterroristic fashion. Few deaths. No claim of credit. Seventy thousand cases of love-sick revery, and no second attack either.

  But that leaves a very important question:

  Who are the reasonable suspects?

  Exclude one word from that question, and quite a lot becomes possible.

  Foreign governments were testing a new weapon.

  Or perhaps our own government was.

  A small, portable device that drops thousands into a helpless state. That would be an excellent way to cripple your enemy while leaving his infrastructure intact. That is an unreasonable scenario with considerable appeal. But the first complaint is to point out the scope of the test and the dozens dead. Wouldn’t that bring too much notoriety? Unless that was the goal, of course. An unexpected nightmare delivered to the unwary world. But if this was and is an experimental weapon, then there is a slightly less unlikely explanation.

  We call it the Castle Bravo scenario.

  Castle Bravo was one of the first thermonuclear tests in the Pacific. The bomb’s yield was two-and-a-half times larger than predicted, and the blast and fallout effects caused years of misery.

  Perhaps our tragedy was the result of similar mistakes.

  But if a government agency isn’t to blame, then who?

  A cult, perhaps. Although that perches close to the terrorist assumptions, with the added problem that no known cult carries any interest in pushing thousands into the arms of imaginary lovers.

  Perhaps a major corporation was testing a new product, and its calculations were a thousandfold wrong.

  Unlikely, but not impossible.

  Even less likely explanations include aliens operating our midst, time travelers from some far human/machine future, and the utterly random hand of some capricious or incompetent god.

  And waiting beyond the impossible:

  The unthinkable.

  Case study:

  Tenured professors are allowed to purchase season tickets, though they are relegated to some famously poor locations. BB and his wife had seats high in the southwestern portion of the stadium. These were fit people but far from young. They left for the restrooms before the first half ended, and they were slowly climbing the steps when the stadium fell into darkness. Probably neither noticed the helmet and golf cart stopping in the middle of the field. BB does recall his wife hesitating in the gloom above him. He speaks affectionately about touching her back, trying to reassure her with his presence, and then came the flash that transported him to another world where he lived and loved for three alien days—long days which would translate to perhaps two weeks by the human count, he estimates.

  To an accomplished physicist, that alternate world appeared perfectly credible.

  Twenty-three minutes after the blast, BB woke to find himself lying on top of his wife. To his horror, he realized that she had fallen hard, driven in part by his own body. Her forehead sharp struck the edge of a concrete step. BB tended to the bloody wound as best he could, and then this man in his late seventies tried to lift his wife, and failed, before screaming as loudly as he could, begging for anyone’s help.

  Sitting nearby were a brother and sister, alert and conversing with one campus police officer. All three came to the rescue, and despite his own head wound, the brother carried the dying woman across other bodies and out into the nearest parking lot. But the medical personnel were elsewhere, lucid or otherwise, and this spouse of fifty-eight years died in the back of a useless ambulance.

  BB’s subsequent depression was prolonged and useful.

  Two months after the funeral, he began working on an explanation for his wife’s murder and the transformation of so many innocent lives. Those efforts led to a series of dense, harshly reasoned papers that have mostly gone unpublished. But the professional indifference hasn’t kept his conclusions from being shared by others, both within his field and far beyond.

  BB claims that what happened isn’t possible. Not according to natural laws, and not according to any compilation of wild hypotheses.

  Impossibility is itself a clue, says BB.

  He has written nothing about his fictional love affair, but the alien world is a different subject. Thoroughly rendered, complete with estimates of size and mass, apparent history and harsh climate, he argues that the world was too intricate and perfect for even an expert to dream up. That means that his vision had to be the work of another mind, a much more competent and relentless mind. According to the old professor, each of us exists inside the dreams of someone greater, and what happened on that October evening was an accident, a sorry mistake.

  The universe is a cosmic fiction.

  That fiction is run by mathematics and vast, unseen machines.

  Some tiny piece of the machinery failed. Which must happen from time to time, as every device has its limits.

  BB argues that there was no bomb or other device inside that football helmet. The golf cart failed because of the initial surge of uninvited energies, and like a fuse popping inside a circuit box, the event came and went quickly enough. But there was leakage from the higher mind, and the professor has both equations and options for experiments that might someday prove him right.

  As mentioned, BB has not published these results in any responsible journal.

  Some of his peers want him to retire finally.

  But the old man refuses. He likes to teach and do research. Those are the only blessings left for him, now that his wife is dead. But he remains confident that the woman lives on, probably somewhere in the higher mind, and death will come soon enough, freeing him for a long, joyous chase.

  What constitutes reasonable answers?

  We can’t say. Months of study and endless discussion has left us with no clear options. But we have cobbled together a variety of stories that capture the elements of what we consider workable, sane explanations.

  Remember the reported scent of perfume.

  Maybe that’s a key.

  And the fifty-yard line too.

  The incident was devised as a study, and the football field supplied a workable transect. Again, think of Castle Bravo. Consider the possibility that the effects far outweighed every projection. The EMP blast wasn’t the first stage. The incident began when someone released a powerful chemical into the atmosphere. The chemical came from the giant helmet or from the hose being towed along, and it migrated inside everyone, brought to the lungs and blood where it had powerful hallucinogenic effects. Perhaps the electrical jolt was meant to height the drug’s effects, or it was a substantial malfunction in an untested system.

  The culprit here would be a major pharmaceutical corporation or a bioengineering start-up.

  What was being tested was a genuine love potion.

  Again, think of the nuclear blast that worked too well.

  The event was meant to be both an experiment and a social event, and only the people on the field should have been infected.

  Horrified by the aftermath, the guilty parties have destroyed their work and gone into hiding.

  And no, we won’t suggest that this is the genuine answer.

  There is zero evidence backing up this story or any other. What we are proposing—indeed, what we insist is true—is that no answers will be forthcoming. Something large did happen. Nothing like it has happened before or since. And so it’s reasonable, even responsible, to claim that we won’t ever learn the truth, and that’s the conundrum we need to deal with today.

  Case study:

  RL is a twenty-year-old woman. A cheerleader before the event, she woke only last week. After more than fifteen months of lying in various beds, in hospitals and then at home, she reports having spent fifty-eight
years elsewhere.

  Her fiance was her only visitor when she woke.

  When told of the circumstances, RL appeared calm, even amused by what had to be unexpected news. This wasn’t the shallow young woman who tumbled and waved pom-poms on the sidelines. She was composed, eerily so. The man whom she was supposed to marry was weeping, telling her about that awful night and the wild theories explaining what had happened. Tech wizards; evil governments; high minds; satanic spells. Then he grabbed one of her skeletal hands, describing how he had watched over her as much as anyone, that he always had been devoted and faithful, and he didn’t care what she did inside that silly dream world. Dreams didn’t matter. What mattered was that God had placed him into her life, here and now, giving him the strength to greet her return to what was real.

  That rush of words and pent-up emotion finally ended.

  A brief, wary silence followed.

  And then the young/old woman laughed. It was a bittersweet sound—profound and hopeless, revealing the enormous gap between the two of them. Her fiance felt the hope draining out of him. His grip weakened. She retrieved her hand and then pointed at him, saying a few words in a language that he didn’t know.

  He eased away.

  And then quietly, in the language she had barely used in half a century, she said, “The last thing I remember . . . ”

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “His hand,” she said.

  “Whose hand?”

  The laughter returned, even sadder.

  Then she grabbed hold of herself, arms crossed on her starved chest, and she said, “My husband was behind me on the steps, in the dark. And he put his hand on my back, and just for a moment, just that last moment . . . I felt young again . . . ”

  About the Author

  Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves“. His most recent book is the The Memory of Sky (Prime Books, 2014).