Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  The standoff continued for ten tense minutes.

  Four huge men in suits came out of the Ruby Sea. Two stopped to talk to the authorities right outside and the other two moved toward the blocking police, talking the crowds out of the way.

  Luis narrated as best he could. “These will be bodyguards, and maybe also lawyers.” To his surprise, they only said about three sentences to the officers, and then the officers turned and left the dock, followed by a string of passengers.

  “Anyone know what happened?” Luis whispered to his watchers.

  The lawyer spoke. “Diplomatic immunity.”

  “Damn.” Luis gave out a slow whistle. “On what grounds?”

  The lawyer again, bitterly. “One of the women on the dock is the new ambassador from Benin.”

  “But we can still search the cargo areas, right?” Luis asked.

  “If they’ve pasted a diplomatic seal on them, then, no. Otherwise, maybe. Watch.”

  The rest of the passengers disembarked. Some looked sleepy, some excited. Only a few had young children with them. Women carried purses and men and children backpacks, but none wheeled luggage.

  The tusks weren’t escaping this way.

  He was even more certain they were here. Diplomatic immunity might succeed, too, darn it all. There had been nothing about it on globenet, but names and nationalities and bank accounts of passengers could be hidden by international law.

  A bus and two cabs pulled up and collected the passengers. The newsbots floated slowly away. Nothing to see here.

  He would wait until the ship left if he needed to. It was only here until nine in the evening. He had brought an apple and cheese in his bag, and although he was hungry, he decided he might be hungrier later. He thought of talking to Makena, but she liked her privacy. So he settled for waiting, staying as meditative as possible while watching statistics for the other Angel programs. Tigers and rhinos were doing well, but the world had lost four whales to three separate incidents—two to the Japanese whaling fleet, one that beached itself off Baja California, and a legal traditional hunt by Native Americans off the Washington coast.

  He had applied for whales, but there were no openings there yet. He might not go now, even if they offered him a job. The elephants needed him.

  On the dock, all but one of the gangways pulled back in.

  THE EARLY MORNING WASN’T yet spilling light into Francine’s window. Almost. While she watched her flimsy screen at the kitchen table, Araceli glanced at her grandmother from time to time. Francine flew the drone smoothly now, with a sense of grace in the flutter of her hands. She knew the elephants by name, too.

  Araceli watched Makena through the drone’s cameras. Spears of sunset bathed the elephants in hot orange light while Araceli shivered in a navy-blue hoodie and fuzzy slippers.

  The animal tracking maps showed impala near the herd, and a family grouping of wildebeest, but no lion or tiger or human to threaten the scene.

  Araceli noticed movement in her window to Luis. It was already midmorning in Charleston, and the shift in point of view as Luis stood up clued her that something had changed. A boat slid through the water from behind the Ruby Sea.

  “MAKENA,” SHE WHISPERED. “WATCH Luis.”

  “Yes,” Makena said softly. “I already am. Two more boats are coming.”

  It was hard to see—her point of view was slaved to Luis, who appeared to be running; the scene in front of her jerked up and down. Then she heard a loudspeaker proclaim, “Stop! Coast Guard.”

  Two larger boats chased the medium-sized boat that had come from behind the cruise ship.

  They weren’t far from the dock. Too far to jump, but close enough to swim.

  “Shit.”

  She had never heard Luis curse.

  Men in black uniforms boiled up out of the center of the boat, shooting. At least six of them.

  Shots came back from the Coast Guard boats.

  Figures and guns fell into the water.

  Newsbots zoomed over Luis’s head.

  Araceli’s heart pounded in her chest as if she were there. She wanted Luis to back away so he couldn’t be hurt, but she had no control of him.

  The muzzle of a gun showed up in her viewpoint, looking like she was aiming. “Don’t!” Araceli yelled. Luis could end up getting caught up in jail, or in trouble. Besides, how would he know who to shoot?

  Makena’s voice joined hers.

  Luis’s hand shook and then he breathed out. “You’re right.”

  The gun disappeared.

  There was no more gunfire anyway. Police and Coast Guard called back and forth to each other, coordinating. One of the two Coast Guard boats drifted away from them, but the other came up beside the smuggler and nudged it toward the dock. Luis’s hand took a line and pulled, but then someone else took it from him. He let it happen and walked away. Araceli’s view changed to the sidewalk in front of him. After a long time, he turned back so they could all watch from a distance.

  “Luis,” she said. “They got them.”

  “Thank God and Mary,” he whispered back.

  Someone dragged a body onto the dock, wet and dripping sea and blood. Another. The way they were treating the bodies suggested they were the smugglers.

  Police cars rolled up one after another with lights and sirens, and then two ambulances and a fire truck.

  The newsbot swarm grew again.

  Araceli flipped to a news channel, which might actually be able to see more than Luis could. Her instincts paid off: they already had pictures of the bottom of the boat lined with ivory. “They got them!” she shouted out loud. She checked on Francine, who wore a wide smile on her face. Makena stood on Delba’s neck with an arm touching the sky, like a triumphant ancient warrior. But then, Araceli was grinning, too. It felt like their shared happiness had jumped distance and time and infected them all with lightness.

  Francine blinked at her and then returned to her watch, tears filling her eyes, looking incongruous above her smile. Araceli felt as if she had expanded. “They did it,” she repeated to Makena. “They got them!”

  “It is a lucky day,” Saad said to them all.

  Araceli flipped to Makena, sitting again now, and to the elephants. The two babies pushed at each other and touched trunks, flaring their ears and making short mock charges. Makena sat on Delba and watched the play with a great wide smile on her face.

  The very last bits of summer sun from Africa kissed the cold Northwest.

  Resnak/Shutterstock, Inc.

  STORY NOTES—Brenda Cooper

  First, the idea of paying people to solve ecological problems (partially as a way to offset a probable future that will have chronic high employment) started with a short article I did for the Futurist magazine. Here’s a link to that article: http://www.wfs.org/futurist/september-october-2012-vol-46-no-5/22nd-century-first-light/forecasts/where-wild-things-are-not.

  So then the World Future Society asked me to speak at their conference, and I started doing research. That research morphed into my Backing into Eden blog series at http://www.backingintoeden.com, which then got picked up at a few other places. One of my posts for Backing into Eden is about elephants—which gave me the idea of writing a story about elephants. I was working on that blog post as I was working on this story. Here’s a direct link: http://www.brenda-cooper.com/2013/06/25/backing-into-eden-chapter-10-the-elephant-angels/. The emotional drive for this story came from my elephant research . . . the things humans do to these beautiful beasts make me very angry.

  The post from Project Hieroglyph that was most related to ideas in this story was Karl Schroeder’s talk about vertical farming, and the idea that if we start to do a lot more vertical farming we might be able to rewild some spaces, which sent me off to work on reading about the commons, which is also a theme in this story.

  Of course, other bits of background in the story, like its global and multinational set of characters, came out of some of the general reading I do as a futurist. />
  FORUM DISCUSSION—Protecting Protected Land

  Brenda Cooper introduced her solution to guarding protected and preserved land to Vandana Singh and other Hieroglyph community members in June 2013. See the conversation unfold at hieroglyph.asu.edu/elephant-angels.

  COVENANT

  Elizabeth Bear

  THIS COLD COULD KILL me, but it’s no worse than the memories. Endurable as long as I keep moving.

  My feet drum the snow-scraped roadbed as I swing past the police station at the top of the hill. Each exhale plumes through my mask, but insulating synthetics warm my inhalations enough so they do not sting and seize my lungs. I’m running too hard to breathe through my nose—running as hard and fast as I can, sprinting for the next hydrant-marking reflector protruding above a dirty bank of ice. The wind pushes into my back, cutting through the wet merino of my baselayer and the wet MaxReg over it, but even with its icy assistance I can’t come close to running the way I used to run. Once I turn the corner into the graveyard, I’ll be taking that wind in the face.

  I miss my old body’s speed. I ran faster before. My muscles were stronger then. Memories weigh something. They drag you down. Every step I take, I’m carrying thirteen dead. My other self runs a step or two behind me. I feel the drag of his invisible, immaterial presence.

  As long as you keep moving, it’s not so bad. But sometimes everything in the world conspires to keep you from moving fast enough.

  © 2013, Haylee Bolinger / ASU

  I thump through the old stone arch into the graveyard, under the trees glittering with ice, past the iron gate pinned open by drifts. The wind’s as sharp as I expected—sharper—and I kick my jacket over to warming mode. That’ll run the battery down, but I’ve only got another five kilometers to go and I need heat. It’s getting colder as the sun rises, and clouds slide up the western horizon: cold front moving in. I flip the sleeve light off with my next gesture, though that won’t make much difference. The sky’s given light enough to run by for a good half hour, and the sleeve light is on its own battery. A single LED doesn’t use much.

  I imagine the flexible circuits embedded inside my brain falling into quiescence at the same time. Even smaller LEDs with even more advanced power cells go dark. The optogenetic adds shut themselves off when my brain is functioning healthily. Normally, microprocessors keep me sane and safe, monitor my brain activity, stimulate portions of the neocortex devoted to ethics, empathy, compassion. When I run, though, my brain—my dysfunctional, murderous, cured brain—does it for itself as neural pathways are stimulated by my own native neurochemicals.

  Only my upper body gets cold: though that wind chills the skin of my thighs and calves like an ice bath, the muscles beneath keep hot with exertion. And the jacket takes the edge off the wind that strikes my chest.

  My shoes blur pink and yellow along the narrow path up the hill. Gravestones like smoker’s teeth protrude through swept drifts. They’re moldy black all over as if spray-painted, and glittering powdery whiteness heaps against their backs. Some of the stones date to the eighteenth century, but I run there only in the summertime or when it hasn’t snowed. Maintenance doesn’t plow that part of the churchyard. Nobody comes to pay their respects to those dead anymore.

  Sort of like the man I used to be.

  The ones I killed, however—some of them still get their memorials every year. I know better than to attend, even though my old self would have loved to gloat, to relive the thrill of their deaths. The new me . . . feels a sense of . . . obligation. But their loved ones don’t know my new identity. And nobody owes me closure.

  I’ll have to take what I can find for myself. I’ve sunk into that beautiful quiet place where there’s just the movement, the sky that true, irreproducible blue, the brilliant flicker of a cardinal. Where I die as a noun and only the verb survives.

  I run. I am running.

  WHEN HE MET HER eyes, he imagined her throat against his hands. Skin like calves’ leather; the heat and the crack of her hyoid bone as he dug his thumbs deep into her pulse. The way she’d writhe, thrash, struggle.

  His waist chain rattled as his hands twitched, jerking the cuffs taut on his wrists.

  She glanced up from her notes. Her eyes were a changeable hazel: blue in this light, gray green in others. Reflections across her glasses concealed the corner where text scrolled. It would have been too small to read, anyway—backward, with the table he was chained to creating distance between them.

  She waited politely, seeming unaware that he was imagining those hazel eyes dotted with petechiae, that fair skin slowly mottling purple. He let the silence sway between them until it developed gravity.

  “Did you wish to say something?” she asked, with mild but clinical encouragement.

  Point to me, he thought.

  He shook his head. “I’m listening.”

  She gazed upon him benevolently for a moment. His fingers itched. He scrubbed the tips against the rough orange jumpsuit but stopped. In her silence, the whisking sound was too audible.

  She continued. “The court is aware that your crimes are the result of neural damage including an improperly functioning amygdala. Technology exists that can repair this damage. It is not experimental; it has been used successfully in tens of thousands of cases to treat neurological disorders as divergent as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, borderline personality, and the complex of disorders commonly referred to as schizophrenic syndrome.”

  The delicate structure of her collarbones fascinated him. It took fourteen pounds of pressure, properly applied, to snap a human clavicle—rendering the arm useless for a time. He thought about the proper application of that pressure. He said, “Tell me more.”

  “They take your own neurons—grown from your own stem cells under sterile conditions in a lab, modified with microbial opsin genes. This opsin is a light-reactive pigment similar to that found in the human retina. The neurons are then reintroduced to key areas of your brain. This is a keyhole procedure. Once the neurons are established, and have been encouraged to develop the appropriate synaptic connections, there’s a second surgery, to implant a medical device: a series of miniaturized flexible microprocessors, sensors, and light-emitting diodes. This device monitors your neurochemistry and the electrical activity in your brain and adjusts it to mimic healthy activity.” She paused again and steepled her fingers on the table.

  “ ‘Healthy,’ ” he mocked.

  She did not move.

  “That’s discrimination against the neuro-atypical.”

  “Probably,” she said. Her fingernails were appliquéd with circuit diagrams. “But you did kill thirteen people. And get caught. Your civil rights are bound to be forfeit after something like that.”

  He stayed silent. Impulse control had never been his problem.

  “It’s not psychopathy you’re remanded for,” she said. “It’s murder.”

  “Mind control,” he said.

  “Mind repair,” she said. “You can’t be sentenced to the medical procedure. But you can volunteer. It’s usually interpreted as evidence of remorse and desire to be rehabilitated. Your sentencing judge will probably take that into account.”

  “God,” he said. “I’d rather have a bullet in the head than a fucking computer.”

  “They haven’t used bullets in a long time,” she said. She shrugged, as if it were nothing to her either way. “It was lethal injection or the gas chamber. Now it’s rightminding. Or it’s the rest of your life in an eight-by-twelve cell. You decide.”

  “I can beat it.”

  “Beat rightminding?”

  Point to me.

  “What if I can beat it?”

  “The success rate is a hundred percent. Barring a few who never woke up from anesthesia.” She treated herself to a slow smile. “If there’s anybody whose illness is too intractable for this particular treatment, they must be smart enough to keep it to themselves. And smart enough not to get caught a second time.”

  You’r
e being played, he told himself. You are smarter than her. Way too smart for this to work on you.

  She’s appealing to your vanity. Don’t let her yank your chain. She thinks she’s so fucking smart. She’s prey. You’re the hunter. More evolved. Don’t be manipulated—

  His lips said, “Lady, sign me up.”

  THE SNOW CREAKS UNDER my steps. Trees might crack tonight. I compose a poem in my head.

  The fashion in poetry is confessional. It wasn’t always so—but now we judge value by our own voyeurism. By the perceived rawness of what we think we are being invited to spy upon. But it’s all art: veils and lies.

  If I wrote a confessional poem, it would begin: Her dress was the color of mermaids, and I killed her anyway.

  A confessional poem need not be true. Not true in the way the bite of the air in my lungs in spite of the mask is true. Not true in the way the graveyard and the cardinal and the ragged stones are true.

  It wasn’t just her. It was her, and a dozen others like her. Exactly like her in that they were none of them the right one, and so another one always had to die.

  That I can still see them as fungible is a victory for my old self—his only victory, maybe, though he was arrogant enough to expect many more. He thought he could beat the rightminding.

  That’s the only reason he agreed to it.

  If I wrote it, people would want to read that poem. It would sell a million—it would garner far more attention than what I do write.

  I won’t write it. I don’t even want to remember it. Memory excision was declared by the Supreme Court to be a form of the death penalty, and therefore unconstitutional since 2043.

  They couldn’t take my memories in retribution. Instead they took away my pleasure in them.

  Not that they’d admit it was retribution. They call it repair. “Rightminding.” Fixing the problem. Psychopathy is a curable disease.

  They gave me a new face, a new brain, a new name. The chromosome reassignment, I chose for myself, to put as much distance between my old self and my new as possible.