by Peter Watts
Glen picks up a breathing apparatus and goggles. There’s also a small instrument on a wrist band. He turns it over in his hands. The technology seems crude and angular against the sleek lines of his alloy skin.
What is it?
An altimeter.
At the onset of spring when the orchard trees are in blossom, Glen sees an angel fall from the sky. It bounces once before his unbelieving eyes and impales on a concrete fence post. Shining silver wings twist and snap. Slick natural innards dangle out of its body cavity onto the mud. Its slender alloy limbs twitch once then hang limp. Its face is sprayed with blood and the jaw is crushed up close to vacant cybernetic eyes.
Onlookers crowd around within minutes. One man heavily burdened with metallic tumors steps up cautiously and rubs his hands in the angel’s blood. The crowd turns manic and shuffles forward to touch the angel. Glen is caught up in the frenzy and a woman with gleaming horns rupturing from her head grabs him and pushes him towards the angel. He resists and slips in the mud and is soon forgotten as more people arrive at the scene.
Then the sound of children running down the street causes everyone to stop and turn their heads. The young ones were kept hidden during the long winter with their shining hooves and tails and extra limbs. Now they shuffle towards the dead angel, ushered by teary-eyed parents.
Young faces smeared.
Red palm prints everywhere.
A kindergarten crime scene watched over by adults babbling in an old language that doesn’t belong in this epoch.
Prayer.
Glen runs to the orchard and pukes under a gnarled plum tree.
Glen hugs Rose once. The growths on her neck look like bronze mushrooms in the early summer light. The sun rises over the blade peak, stoking the fire he has held in check these long months. He adjusts his extra large backpack and his utility belt.
I’m sorry, he says.
Why?
I . . . I’m not sure. It feels like I’m letting you down.
She laughs in the same way she had on the day they met. You’d be letting me down if you stay. Letting all the others down. Everyone wants to know the mystery but very few have the means.
Haven’t you tried? He doesn’t know why he never asked her.
Ha, me? No, I know my limits. She points to the blade peak. I’ve only ever reached the summit. That’s not very far, he says.
It was far enough for me.
I’ll come back.
She kisses him on the lips. No you won’t, she says, and walks down to the favella and doesn’t look back.
It takes him a day to reach the summit. His breath curls out in long plumes. The sky is blue and cloudless and the view on the other side makes him fall to one knee. It had been a shadow haunting his dreams these months but now the splinter juts from the earth below and angles up to the sky like a glossy black crystal stretching out forever. Layers of storm detritus crust its lower lengths and ice fields mottle the higher reaches. Further still the ice fades to black. The structure is about a kilometer wide with an angled peak. But the length? The length is incalculable. Fifty kilometers? More.
The voice of the evangelist stirs in his memory. It should collapse under its own weight.
I don’t know what that means, was all Glen could say at the time.
He clambers down off the blade peak where the earth is broken and dotted with treacherous crevices, but he finds his way safely onto the northern slope of the splinter. There are tracts of land here where the detritus is compacted hard. The going is slow but the ground seems stable enough. Some sparse trees have seeded in tangled groves to provide crude shelter along the way.
He dons the oxygen mask and goggles and extra layers of clothing when he reaches the ice fields that creak and crack under his boots. He worries constantly about avalanches taking him under tonnes of ice and over the edge to the four-kilometer drop below.
When he sleeps, he dreams of fallen angels and praying humans.
In the cold mornings when he wakes, he knows the temperature would kill anyone else. There’s very little natural skin left. Some patches on his stomach and chest beneath the woollen layers. He feels his numb face and wonders if frostbite has set in. He looks at his reflection in his palm and doesn’t recognize the person looking back. His eyes are like the angel, more machine than man. Even his hair is bronze like Mum’s used to be.
He survives on melted ice. The rations are long gone but he doesn’t feel hungry. Things stir and rearrange in his belly and days go by where he is gripped with pain and cannot walk far at all. The ice gets thicker. Great fields of white. All sense of time and purpose drown in the glare. Memories lay dormant in some recess of his mind. He can’t even remember the names of the dead but he still feels their ghosts. There are strange sounds in the air and he turns occasionally to see if anyone is following.
He hikes for days yet the splinter is at such a shallow angle that the altimeter on his wrist only reads thirty kilometers. The ice thins out to black. He has avoided the splinter’s surface this far, but now there’s no choice. The remaining length is pure black for as far as the eye can see. He takes a tentative step forward. The surface reminds him of the deep water beyond the reef and he half expects to fall through. As his confidence grows, he walks around in circles and stamps his feet. Satisfied, he kneels down and presses his face to the cold black. There’s some kind of faint resonance within the structure that tingles his alloy skin. He wonders why he is not surprised.
Something causes him to glance back at his campsite. He had carved a hollow on the leeward side of an ice knoll. There’s no sleeping bag or tent or equipment. He can’t remember when he left them behind. The fact that he also left his jacket and boots and clothes somewhere on the trail is only remotely disturbing. And once he realizes he is no longer using the breathing apparatus, he doesn’t much care about anything at all.
Beyond fifty kilometers altitude, it’s all about the curvature of the world. He ventures closer to the northern edge of the splinter to watch the sun shed dappled light over the Pacific. He wonders why people don’t name things anymore. Weather patterns evolve like an artist’s canvas. A cyclone unfurls along the coast trailing great white spirals of cloud.
Up here the air is warmer and calm and breathless, and he sees the beauty of the earth with his newfound eyes. There is a sense of longing at leaving the brown lands below. Some part of him is convinced he is fully cybernetic now. At what point did the cutover occur? Did it take his brain during the night only for him to wake with phantom thoughts indistinguishable from a real human mind?
Lizzy told him on the day the tumors took her face that she knew the plague had reached her brain but it didn’t feel any different. She still liked the texture of sand between her toes. She still hated the taste of oysters and the color orange. She still wanted to strive with all her remaining breath to live and love and be with the people that meant the most to her.
Including you, little brother. Including you.
He sits on the edge with his feet dangling and unfastens the altimeter from his wrist and throws it out into open air. Days come and go against the permanence of the splinter sloping higher into impenetrable night. The feeling that he is now leaving everything cuts deep into his soul. Or the illusion of one that now resides in his computational brain that makes its own altitude calculations and swiftly scrutinizes his body and the surrounding environment.
You have your wings.
The voice drifts in from the middle distance. Somehow Glen knows the speed of sound varies with air density and temperature gradients and his brain accommodates. The angel flies beneath his vantage point, curving in a long lazy arc like an eagle he had seen once rising on thermals. Before Glen knows it, the angel lands next to him in a crouched position with wings folded over its back. The close proximity of another being after so long is alarming, and all Glen can do is stare in awe at the angel’s bronze skin adorned with gray alloys like swirling tribal tattoos.
I suppose you
could call them that, Glen says after a long silence. His emergent wings are small by comparison and move awkwardly, as if mimicking the majesty of the angel.
I’ve been waiting for someone to venture this far, the angel says.
Glen laughs at the stupidity of it all. How’s that possible? I’m a dumb kid with stunted wings on a quest that never ends.
The angel laughs. Exactly!
Glen waves his hands absently. Whatever.
The angel laughs again and points to the Earth. It’s everywhere, you know.
Glen sees the shining patterns radiating out from the splinter across the ground, like the veins along Rose’s neck and the threads in the highland fruit and the patina on the rocks on the shore of his old home.
I know, Glen says.
It’s touching the carbon in all living things, the angel says. And in the layers of the land that were once alive. It’s mimicking all the forms hidden in the story book of our genes.
Glen wonders at all the manifestations in all the people he has encountered. The science is still new to me, he says, but I have seen the different forms emerge.
The angel seems nonchalant. It’s searching the code of life.
Well it’s not doing a very good job, is it?
The angel gives Glen a mysterious look and stands up and holds out its hand. Think of it more as evolution. Let me take you a little further.
There’s no point, Glen says. He thinks back to the man on the land bridge. Even out here after all these months he feels much the same, lost before he has even started.
The angel arches an eyebrow. If you haven’t noticed there are not many folk up here.
Glen slams his fist down on the hard surface of the splinter. It gives off a dull clang and he looks at his hand and sees the alloy is now disappearing beneath layers of tough black coating.
Did we create this? Is it from the industrial epoch?
Hardly.
Then where does it come from?
Let’s go.
Why don’t you just go on up there yourself?
The angel gives a grim smile. I would if I could. I still have flesh on the inside.
Glen reaches out and lets the angel pull him up to his feet. I don’t think I can go much further, he says.
Oh, I think you can.
The curve of blue sky bleeds away into layers of umber and saffron. Sunrise is only minutes away. Glen turns to wave goodbye to the angel but remembers that it was days ago somewhere down in the deeper layers of the atmosphere. There’s no sign of anything except the ever-present splinter beneath his feet and the patchwork of stars above and the odd meteor trail. His body is accommodating the colder temperature here. His skin is ultra hard and pure black, like the splinter. Wings are a mix of copper and tough alloys with delicate mirrored surfaces. Memories are still human, though he wonders at that.
The other splinters poke out across the horizon like needles. Most are embedded in the Earth at the same obtuse angle. Others are skewed at more severe inclines. One lays broken to the south, sheered into two pieces lying on the edge of the Australian coast like the pillars of some lost city. All the impact zones are filled with spreading geometries as the cybernetic life form continues to blend with nature. He can see many things with his far sight. He knows now that knowledge is never lost, just hidden in the world. He knows that the sentience of the splinters has tapped into the universal forms in the gene pool. Eyes. Wings. Legs. Spine. He knows that it is seeking perfection of form. Long and perfect as it is in its own symmetry. Maybe they arrived here on purpose. Maybe by mistake. A swarm caught up in the gravitational well.
He strides along the splinter until it narrows to a tip where the air thins out completely into vacuum. There is no room to walk here, so he crawls then wraps his arms around the end of the splinter and holds on tight.
He’s more afraid than ever.
Which is ridiculous really.
After all this time.
He feels connections through his skin with the resonant patterns of the splinters, an emergent language as old as the stars themselves. There are others up here, in orbit way above his location. On clear nights he thinks he can see some on the moon.
What to do, he says to himself. There is no sound here, but there are signals if you listen close enough. There is no flesh now, but there is soul in the machinery if you delve deep enough. There is no end to the quest, but there are new shores if you look hard enough.
And there it is.
An answer!
Or part of one.
Life is a series of new shores blending from one to another. The fusion of genetic forms within forms. The fusion of biological layers upon layers spanning immense periods of time. And here was yet another layer wrapping around the globe. Cybernetic fusing with flesh.
There is nothing else for it. He stands up and balances precariously on the tip of the splinter. Ultralight wings spread out and soak up the energies of the sun now rising like a beacon.
Time to fly.
Taking the Ghost
A.C. Wise
“Still with me?”
Mac coughed and pushed at the face leaning over his, inches distant. The man didn’t move.
“Still.” It came out as a wheeze. Mac rolled onto his side, trying to put enough air into his lungs to ask where. He remembered smoke, cannon fire, crawling, trying to reach the prince. Motion. Someone carrying him? After that, a wash of red-black pain and the smell of something burning.
Another cough wracked him. He clutched aching ribs and let the pain shake him. It took a moment for mind to catch up to body. Only one arm wrapped his mid-section. The other . . . He could still feel it. Fuck, but he could feel it. Except . . .
“Shit!” He jerked back, but there was nowhere to go. His back collided with a hard edge of wood, heels scrabbling against dusty planks.
He stared. Visual input and physical sensation refused to mesh. Mac’s arm folded around his body, holding the pain. And his arm ended at the shoulder, a charred stump smelling faintly of smoke.
“Cauterized it for you while you were out.” The face leaning into his drew back. “Not the ideal setting.” The man gestured to the wagon bed, boxy wood, bolted the back of an ancient truck cab, more rust than metal. “But I figured I’d better do it sooner’n not. Didn’t want you to bleed out. You’re welcome, by the way.”
Gray dominated the man’s dreads, but his skin showed barely any wrinkles. He rose from his crouch. His left leg was metal; the joints whined as he jumped from the truck bed, raising dust where he landed. He opened the truck door, but paused leaning to peer at Mac. Light glinted off green glass, jammed through the flesh of his brow, and burrowed into his cheek, obscuring his right eye. A mass of scars surrounded the glass, shiny and old.
“Name’s Zeb.” The man stuck out his hand; Mac cautiously peeled his left hand from his pained ribs and accepted it. Zeb’s palm was calloused and rough, his skin warm.
“We got a ways to go yet. Best you rest up. You’ve been through a lot.”
Mac tried again to ask where—where he was, where they were going. The prince. What had happened to her? His head ached, his mouth too dry to form the first word. As if reading his thoughts, Zeb leaned into the truck’s cab and tossed a leather canteen into the truck bed.
“Try to sleep,” he said as he closed the door.
Mac slumped back. The engine coughed to life. Vibrations shuddering up through the wood sent a fresh wave of pain through his body. He reached for the canteen with his right arm. Nothing. He fought rising bile, squeezing his eyes closed. He forced himself to take a breath before fumbling the canteen’s cap off with his left hand and taking a pull of the warm, dusty water.
The truck lurched forward with a bang, spitting more dust and exhaust. Mac bit down on a scream. The next jolt of the truck did him in; unconsciousness mercifully shielded him from further pain.
Mac woke to the thump of the truck’s tailgate lowering. He squinted, bleary. His head floated—h
ollow and fever-hot; his mouth tasted of red dirt and blood. An old man nudged a canteen within Mac’s reach. Zeb. Yes, the old man was Zeb. Mac managed to sit up without vomiting, breathing shallow until dizziness passed.
Beyond Zeb’s shoulder, a wall of junk cast its shadow over the truck—twisted metal, fused plastic, shattered chunks of concrete and stone, all studded with winking glass and topped in razor wire. One of the way station junkyards scattered along the trade routes between cities. But which one? Mac’s knowledge of geography ended at the city walls. He’d been too young when they moved to remember anything but the city, and he’d never cared to learn anything beyond what the prince had deigned to tell him. Even then, he’d barely listened, more interested in her lips than the words falling from them.
Pain lanced Mac’s right arm. He clapped a hand to it, and his fingers passed right through, touching his side.
“My arm.” The memory of his right arm hung limp against his side. He couldn’t move it. It was just there, heavy, shoulder itching.
“Yup. War’s a bitch.” Zeb scratched his nose. “Don’t worry, we’ll find something to replace it.”
He held out a hand. Mac inched forward, not trusting his body, his weight. The indignity of Zeb hauling him from the truck, holding him up with an arm around his shoulders, was outweighed by the horror of the man’s fingers touching an arm that wasn’t there. Mac’s stomach cramped and he brought up bile, spitting it onto the dust.
“Leave me.” Mac wiped his lips, eyes closed. The city, the prince, everything was gone; all Mac wanted to do was lie down, let the sun bake his flesh from his bones—those that remained.
“Look, you wanna die out here that’s your business.” Zeb’s strength, surprising for his age, kept Mac upright even though his knees wanted to buckle and crash him to the ground. “I saved your life, but if you don’t want to extend me even the slightest bit of gratitude for my efforts, so be it.”
Zeb released him. By some cruel trick of gravity, Mac didn’t fall. He raised his head. Nothing but dust, as far as he could see, and the shadows of buzzards staining the red. The color brought the smell of burning and blood to clog nose and mouth. He brought up hands to claw the scent away. No . . . Only one hand. He bucked, his body trembling rebellion against his conviction to die.
