Division: A Collection of Science Fiction Fairytales

by Lee S. Hawke

  He wrenched his eyes away before they could seize on the man’s good looks, calculating and quantifying them even as electric signals raced through his brain and fired his neurotransmitters ecstatically. Not that it mattered, his receptors were as desensitised as mud. If beauty was addictive, as his lecturers had always claimed, then he was a burnt out junkie. He couldn’t be bothered any more. He just couldn’t.

  He walked into work without saying hello to either the achingly attractive receptionists or his equally good looking colleagues. Instead he went straight down the corridor, lined by tasteful art and glass and light, and into his office. Then he closed the door and slumped against it, feeling besieged.

  He took a moment for himself - several moments - and breathed in the recycled office air of the morning, the hum of routine, people and machines. He closed his eyes and felt the weight of his technician’s coat, the pinch of his glasses, the shape of his skin. One hand fell on instinct to brush the gently blinking, spider-like arms of the CTR8400 next to him. The machine felt right and good and simple underneath his fingers, something he could understand. Not like the people it had been created to serve.

  He snatched three more seconds to wipe his sleepily blinking glasses. Then, wearing the same heavy set of features he’d brought to the clinic, Damian took a deep breath and opened his office door. Immediately, sound flooded in from the waiting room. Dial tones blended with the susurrus of fidgeting bodies packed into uncomfortable chairs and the one, ever-present, furiously-whispered business call. He felt the beginnings of a headache birth, right between his eyes. "Number 1!" he called.

  His glasses flashed. The client card materialised in the upper right corner of his lens. ADRIANO TENMA. CITIZEN CODE: 16009382492R. Clinic code 2XR453. VISITS: NEW.

  Damian blinked. They didn’t often get new clients. Anyone who could afford CTR treatment was already with them, or a competitor. Curiosity piqued, he scanned the crowd. A petite woman stood up from the rows of massed humanity gulping coffee and plugged into the latest news. "Thank you, Doctor," Adriano said. His voice was low and sweet. "I'm ready."

  He was. As they walked back together to the office, specifications popped in front of Damien’s eyes, multiplying over themselves in their eagerness. For a moment, they were just collections of alien numbers and letters, and then three decades of experience kicked in and began translating. Damian half-closed his eyes and saw young cheeks, dimpled skin, a broad nose and high eyebrows. Symmetrical. Classic beauty. He opened his eyes, looked at the already-beautiful, already-young client by his side, and sighed through his teeth. Of course.

  They reached the room and the machine. “Please sit,” he said, suddenly abrupt. “Since it’s your first time here, I’ll just go through the introductory notes. As you no doubt know, the procedure is painless and will last for a minimum of 12 years unless you override it with another procedure. If you want to prepay for 10 CTRs, you pay the rate for 9. If you want to be like those crazy celebrities and come in every two hours, you can get out of my clinic.”

  Adriano stretched himself out under the CTR-8400’s rotating arms with practiced ease. “Thank you, Doctor,” he interrupted softly. “But I have undergone this procedure before.”

  Damian raised bushy eyebrows. “Not with me, you haven’t,” he said. “Why the change?”

  Underneath Adriano’s smooth, perfectly sculpted features, Damian thought he saw the twitch of a smile. “None of the others would fulfil my order.”

  “Right...” Damian slowly lowered himself into his seat and scanned the numbers again. “Everything seems standard. L3295 for the eyes, H458 for your jawline, O4530 for your hair, E3942 for the skin..."

  Adriano's soft voice interrupted his drone. "E3943, please,"

  Damian paused. He checked the number blinking on the lens of his glasses, and then stared through them. "I beg your pardon?"

  A line furrowed that perfect brow, followed by the flare of a dull rose underneath dimpled cheeks. "E3943, please," Adriano repeated quietly. And then, almost defensively, "I just want to give it a try."

  A sharp retort rose to the tip of Damian’s tongue, but he swallowed it. He looked at Adriano again and mentally revised his opinions. If he had undergone the procedure before, then he could be eighty and still look like a beautiful young woman. The eyes staring back at him were ageless. And this wasn’t some rich twelve year old trying out a different nose, or a spoilt brat of an adult intent on fixing an already-perfect jawline. This was different. This was revolutionary.

  Damian heard his own voice through a gathering fog of excitement. “Of course, Mr. Temna. My apologies. If that’s the case, might I suggest a few other changes to your specifications? For the overall effect?”

  Adriano closed his lovely eyes. Something like peace seemed to spread across his face, dissolving invisible lines and imaginary flaws. “I trust your judgement, doctor.”

  Damian let loose a breath he didn’t realise he’d been holding. “Then we’ll begin at once.”

  He didn’t look at the numbers again. He put through the wireless transmission and adjusted the calibrations, feeling a thrill he’d long thought murdered and gone as his fingers skated over steel and flexiplas. Nobody that he knew of had ever performed this combination, not in all the years since CTR had changed the world. He’d been a young girl then, and he still remembered the first advertisements. Transcend age. Transcend race. Transcend gender. But since he’d stepped out of medical school, all he’d ever done was fulfil the same three basic templates, again and again and again. The possibility of infinite variation had led only to convergence.

  Until now.

  He gave the dial one last twist, and the CTR-8400 was ready. He found himself speaking automatically, along with the machine. “Please close your eyes, this will only take a moment."

  He normally turned away from the patient at this point, to monitor the flashing numbers in the waiting room and the speed of the other technicians. Today, he stayed frozen in his seat and watched in fascination as the hypnotically spinning arms went to work. Dried omni-sculpt was stripped away and new pockets injected along thin cheeks and jawlines. A laser hummed, and Damian almost saw the colours of Adriano's irises changing beneath his lids. Metal whirred, burnishing and finishing, skimming parts off limbs and reattaching other curves. And then, finally, a little-used arm studded with syringes rotated down and injected itself firmly into the base fluid.

  Damian saw the colour spread like blood in water. Curlicues of amber, then dark toffee, floated beneath Adriano’s skin. The syringes shook once, twice, and then retracted.

  Adriano blinked. Slowly, he rose. He pressed his fingers gingerly to heated flesh, and then glanced up through his feet at the wall-to-wall mirror. Damian held his breath.

  Gently, reverently, Adriano touched his jaw. "Beautiful," he murmured, in that honey-coloured voice. He turned liquid brown eyes towards him. His new black curls fell into his face. “Thank you, doctor. You have surpassed all expectations."

  To his surprise, Damian found he was smiling. "You are beautiful,” he said. And although he’d said it so many times before, this time he meant it.

  He walked with Adriano out to the waiting room. None of the waiting clients looked away from their screens to gasp. He felt shaken, new, reborn. "Number 2!" he called. He turned just in time to see Adriano wave as the door closed behind him.

  He never came back.

  LEMURIA

  Elewa once asked me what I would do, if the Others were weeping outside my door and I had hours left. His eyes had been on the cupboards, and the way he’d asked had told me what he was looking for. A confirmation, a reaffirmation of how he wanted to go. After all, a quick slice of a kitchen knife and then a gentle, peaceful bleeding out was much better than having your soul extracted through every orifice of your face and then having your husk of a body cannibalised through a vacuum.

  “I’d try to finish the Coder,” I said quietly.

  Neither of us had gotten what w
e wanted that day. When we took our things and stepped outside, readying each breath to be our last, we weren’t able to find the precious copper wiring that I needed. The houses on each side had already been stripped, and neither of us wanted to venture more than a few blocks. It was too dangerous, and there was nobody left beside us to protect the Coder.

  We returned that night bitter but alive. Him with the knowledge that I didn’t wish for death. Me with the knowledge that the ascendance I wanted, the greedy promise of a life beyond our ruined world, was still out of reach.

  It didn’t matter though, because the next day the Others found us.

  * * *

  The stars going out was the first sign that something was wrong. I was ten then, old enough to understand that something huge was happening, young enough to watch the grown-ups descend into quiet, civilised panic over the course of a few months. And young enough to be bewildered by the fact that the sucking fear seemed to vanish overnight.

  People moved on. They went to sleep, woke up, and went to their jobs. Terror ceased to be our constant companion, and mealy-faced excuses made their way out instead as everyone figured out how to lie to themselves. So for the first eight years, nobody believed the astronomers and blamed pollution, and then for the last two nobody really cared what it meant, that the stars were going out, or seemed to be going out. It was old news. Like the dinosaurs.

  In the tenth year, and my twentieth, the Others came.

  * * *

  In retrospect, if people had known exactly what the Others were, Earth would never have been taken so quickly. Instead, the very first thing that someone did was broadcast one wailing outside the White House on international television. And everyone who was unlucky enough to watch it live had their dimensional signatures traced and were paid visits the next morning.

  I didn’t watch the show, because I wasn’t in the habit of watching the news when I could build things late into the night, playing with my wires and circuits and throwing myself into the internet like it was my lover. So I was in bed sleeping well into the morning when I was woken by a crash, by my mother running from the house, screaming, and the end of the world coming into my living room.

  Let me tell you this, there is nothing as horrifying as hearing somebody you love sound like that: like a raw animal being skinned alive. Not even the sight of my father, after the Abomination withdrew its tentacles from the ruins of his face. Maybe that’s because the next moment he was gone. But my mother kept on screaming.

  * * *

  The cellphone videos went viral over the internet until people realised that watching the videos meant you got a visit.

  * * *

  My mother went next. I suspect that she may have deliberately looked them up, wanting to know what had happened to the all-encompassing love of her life. I don’t think she thought about me at all. I wish I could hate her for it, but I saw her website history before I deleted it all. People will believe anything when they’re desperate.

  If I had to choose between destroying the Others and murdering every crackpot who insisted they were taking souls to heaven/the next dimension/whatever fucked up shit they could dream of, I would be forced to hesitate and evaluate my choices. The Others are honest, at least.

  * * *

  Honest and reliable. When I heard the quiet moans at first, I told myself it was the wind. And then I remembered that I had only survived this long, a good six months after that first broadcast, because I had decided early on that I would refuse to lie to myself.

  Elewa was still asleep. I got up from the puddle of looted blankets and torn pillows and padded to the frosted glass windows arched decoratively around the front door. We had chosen this abandoned house precisely because of them. I got onto my hands and knees and squinted through. I needn’t have bothered. I could hear the drip of tears now on the cracked pavement outside, sizzling like acid, eating away at the structures of this dimension. The moans were still quiet, not yet the full-throated storm of cries and weeping that would allow the Abomination through. I tried to think of when we had seen them, or when they had seen us. We’d been so careful. So careful.

  My mind scrambled to its feet. I tried to follow it dully, but my body was slow, tangled up in the net of memories. My mother had been a small woman. The Abomination had spread out her remains across the kitchen floor. My brain juddered. I blinked and saw my own ruined features scattered to rot across designer furniture and obsolete electronics. I blinked again and saw Elewa. I blinked and saw our world - desolate, under siege, dying.

  My feet, my real feet, made it to the laundry. I looked at the Coder, and it looked back at me.

  * * *

  Whatever can be said of humanity and how it fell, we were learning and fighting to the very end. Even though we couldn’t do very much, because there’s only so much even nuclear weapons will do against something not from our space-time reality, at least our efforts attracted the attention of something else. Or someone else.

  Whoever they were, they sent a message and the Coders. The message was written in the blank night sky, in the brief flashes of fading stars that we’d thought long dead. That in itself was a miracle, enough to convince most people of the possibility of salvation. I didn’t see the message myself, but it was all over the internet in ten minutes. SAFETY. COME TO LEMURIA.

  As for the Coders, ours popped up the night I worked up the nerve to leave the house and make a mad dash across the city to my brother’s. Just a small, innocuous box, with the message stamped on it in fading tendrils of silver. SAFETY. COME TO LEMURIA.

  The problem was, whoever had sent them hadn’t known much about humanity. Or perhaps they had been deliberately left unfinished. Who knows. But they didn’t work out of the box, so to speak. So what happened in the end was that people experimented a lot, and shared them on the parts of the net that were still alive, and I saw a lot of horrific endings.

  But one video stayed with me, the one that got to over 1 million views in two days. Meaningful statistics in a new world where people quickly discovered that watching the wrong thing - or being watched by the wrong thing - would kill you.

  It was a simple, slightly grainy video. The sound ran through, unedited. The maker was in a rush: she put the phone down precariously, did something off-screen, and then ran back into position. Her heels clacked on the tiles as she moved, she was working in a dim basement with grease on her elbow. She held the Coder up to the phone, spinning it around, showing the adjustments she’d made. My eyes picked out the copper wire, the chip, the connector. She took a deep breath, told us her name was Jada, said goodbye to some guy named Labron. And then she twisted the Coder sharply.

  And reality began to twist, just like when the Abominations come through. Only this time, Jada watched the air eat itself up until it formed a half-shrunken door. She crawled through and the air flattened and vanished. And she was gone.

  The movie ran on until the phone died. I kept watching every second, waiting for her to appear again, to be sunk back to our failed planet.

  But she never came back.

  * * *

  Back in the laundry, my hands skated over the connector, the chip. Everything was there except for the wires. I shook as I stared at it, as my thumbs stroked the black surface again and again. I’d seen what had happened to people who had got it wrong. Some had arced back, screaming from electricity. Some had had the time to smile before the white-hot explosion. Or even worse, some had just sat there, waiting for it to work. And then eventually, they’d reached over and turned off the phone.

  I’d never seen someone try Jada’s configuration without the copper wire. I weighed it up now. The promise of safety guarded by risk, or the knowledge that an inter-dimensional Abomination was coming to suck me dry.

  “Aisha! AISHA!”

  Elewa tore through the door. His eyes were wide, staring, bloodshot with terror. It took a moment for fresh words to come out, spilling like maggots. “They’re here, Aisha, oh god they’re here.”<
br />
  He’d seen the remnants of his wife and daughter. I’d seen the remnants of our parents. We were both people beyond repair, living in a world that had already been conquered but refused to believe it.

  “I know,” I said helplessly. “I know.” Then I held up the Coder. “But we still have a chance. Elewa…”

  He backed away from me, shaking his head. His voice slipped into his big brother voice, his I-have-to-look-after-my-little-sister voice. “Aisha, get up. Leave that thing behind. We have to run.”

  “Run where?” I burst out. And then I stopped. We both knew that there was no point running. People had tried. But once the Others had a lock on whatever was inside, well… how do you run from something that can appear through space and time?

  I took a breath, tried to restart. “Elewa,” I said again, “I think this can still work. Just… just maybe differently.”

  I had no idea, actually, but I knew how I didn’t want to die.

  So did Elewa. He looked at me like I was crazy. Perhaps I was. He opened his mouth to say something, decided against it. Then he kept backing away, and away, until he was out of the laundry and I heard him running.

  His eyes stayed with me for a moment, though, because they looked so acutely like betrayal.

  * * *

  I didn’t let myself hear Elewa leave. The moaning was growing louder anyway, beginning to veer up into the atmosphere, to crack the world. I had minutes. But I’d made my decision. Now I just had to put it into action.