Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #222

by TTA Press Authors

  It was the third strike which shook me back to my fighting best. I drew wide, sucking in the belly of the Chevy to ease up onto the sidewalk and narrowly avoid the stalks of the gas lights. Glancing over, I saw a hammer arm wielding a tremendous steel wrecking ball at the rear of the Dart. How the weight of the thing didn't roll that coupe was anyone's guess, but Billy had always been the physicist. Meanwhile, I was just a grease monkey ... I was also the better driver. There was one chance and one chance only to end the thing well, at least for me and Emmie-Lou. I crushed the brake. Cranking the suicide knob hard to the right, I swung the Chevy between two gas lights and back out onto the track immediately in the shadow of the Dart. I caught Billy's face ghosting his rear view. No two eyes had ever shone as cold.

  "Gonna ride your back, Billy,” I shot beneath my breath. My fingers swept the bank of switches at the dash, closed around and depressed a lever by my thigh. A final blast of steam punched in to fire up the hydraulics. The front two corners of the Chevy dipped way low. Then we kicked off a full two metres clear of the strip, stomachs tumbling, blood roaring in our skulls.

  The landing was sweet and tough by equal measure; sweet to feel the reverb as the Chevy hit the Dart hard across the shoulders, steelies revving off the wide-bottomed boiler to send us flying out over Billy's head to crash down out in front; tough because I heard the stunt take its toll on the ride that had cost me three years working the pumps at Mickey's Garage. I flicked the steering, then hit it hard to the left, the Chevy clawing its way into a bootlegger and coming to rest alongside the church door. The Dart slammed in hard to the black shark's trunk. Steam filled the air like a pea souper.

  I leant across and unbuckled Emmie-Lou's seat belt.

  "Think you can run now, Emmie-Lou?"

  "Sure thing, Johnny."

  "Then grab that pretty frock of yours and let's get us to a preacher."

  "Just one problem, Johnny.” Emmie-Lou's face drained of all shades of cream and roses. “Billy's at the window and he's touting a blade."

  Nothing to worry about, my blue-eyed baby. Let me deal with the bad dog at the door. Let me take the knife for you. Let me carry the weight. Out loud, I said, “So Billy's not gonna give it up ‘til blood's spilt. Okay then."

  Emmie-Lou's hand was a branding iron at my forearm. I smiled at her with my eyes, then cranked the door handle, slid out a boot, crunched down on a stone as I rose, and eased out. “Get dressed,” I said last thing and shut Emmie-Lou in.

  Billy was fired up. Spit escaped out a corner of his mouth as he breathed hard. His eyes stayed cold though. He rocked side to side on spread feet, one hand out for balance, the other clenching the blade. I kept my silverware hid in my palm; I trusted the catch to spring open inside a second. It'd been tripped enough times to keep it fit for purpose.

  "Least you didn't end up in the weeds, Billy.” I fixed on him grimly. “What's more, I ain't hunting pink slips. Dart's yours, and to pay the necessary, it's a helluva blower. But my Chevy won the race fair and square. Time for you and me to part ways."

  "And Emmie-Lou?” Billy tugged on his collar, its stiffness etched on his face.

  "Knocked up. Part Fly, part Rocketeer, our rug rat's gonna be a mutant by both gang's standards, a kid who can't fit, no way no how.” I eased back against the still-warm Chevy, cocked my head and squinted at Billy. I squeezed out a drop of true feeling. “I'd give up my pink slips for that runt, for its blue-eyed mamma too."

  In those last few moments between end of Rebel's Hour and dawn, Billy squinted over, the smallest trace of understanding at his lips. The seed of a smile grew up at the edges, and I saw then that it was anything but friendly. I was suddenly aware of the dark shapes of a hundred or more Rocketeers’ machines at my back, their engines idling. The occasional spurt of steam was a bleak reminder of the gang members hovering nearby. I tensed my hand around the blade. Billy kept on smiling.

  Emmie-Lou startled the pair of us. The door handle clunked and she started to emerge, white silk frothing at her ankles. I glanced at her with a blaze of yearning, just as Billy stepped forward and slid in the knife.

  For an instant, she was soft, doused in scent and yielding. Then the blood began to seep through her dress. My flesh felt as if it were scorched off my bones. Devil's mercy, the ache! So much gut wrenching pain as my girl stumbled backwards from both Billy and me, and up onto the church steps where a preacher stood, dressed head to toe in black and condemnation. He caught Emmie-Lou as she fell, manoeuvred the both of them down onto the steps and sat, cradling her head like a child's.

  I turned towards the Chevy. Staring at my reflection in the driver side window, I contemplated who was real that instant, the torn man on the sidewalk or the two-dimensional figure in the glass. A second later, I span around, blade unsheathed.

  The slash to Billy's throat was deep, neat and designed to drain life quickly. He made a motion as if to come for me, but I was already striding away. Billy was done for. He just didn't realise it yet.

  Dawn stripped the layers of night from the sky. I fell to my knees on the first step. It was more than I dared do to disturb Emmie-Lou, cradled safely as she was in the arms of a better man. Out of the corner of my eye, I registered Billy stagger in my direction before he fell face forward, his blood greasing the strip like a skid mark. The air was thick with noise as the Rocketeers flocked.

  No matter. If there was no Emmie-Lou, I'd slip the blade between my own ribs.

  "Johnny,” she whispered.

  I leant in, trembling.

  "It's not over ‘til we're wed."

  Agony dug in at my forehead. “They're coming for me, Emmie-Lou. There ain't time."

  "You promised, Johnny. You, me, and the babe. Said, together, we're gonna see this jacked up world reborn."

  Her words were an adrenalin shot to the heart. I stood up slowly. “Start reading, preacher."

  The man glanced at me. My expression must have been crazed enough to convince him.

  "Dearly beloved. We are gathered here today...” His voice was a dark scrape of sound.

  I met Emmie-Lou's gaze. She seemed less substantial then, like a figure cut from burnout and reminding me of how she'd looked on the day that we first met.

  "Do you take this woman..."

  "Hell, yeah!” I'd try my best, Emmie-Lou. But there'd be no reaching the end of this marriage service for me. Scaring my mind with her fading image, I turned back around to face the street.

  In their slim-cut suits, white and ghoulish green starched shirts, Chelsea boots, and steam-powered backpacks, the Rocketeers edged in, the hard gleam of hatred in their eyeballs. Blades flicked out from palms and pockets. Time bled away. I was breathing stolen air.

  It was a stiff metallic crunch followed by the hiss of ebbing pressure in miniaturised hydraulics that alerted me to the swarm overhead. They came now, a thousand Flies, tumbling down from the bell tower in zigzagging, jagged motion. I watched them punch the long iron candy canes of their suckers hard against the brick, depress levers in each palm to release the gas, then freefall. I remembered that great rush of air and disconnection from the earth, and it flooded me with awe and sorrow.

  Having pleated their suckers into half-a-metre long cylinders stored at their backs, other hundreds of Flies blackened the skies. Landing on the sidewalk in-between me and the hordes of Rocketeers, the gang members lowered their arms, concertinaed their canvas glider wings into the back pouch in their leather, and drew out their suckers from the sheaths at their spines. They whipped the skull-crushing iron canes out to their full extension; steam oozed from the tips.

  I sat down as Emmie-Lou said, “I do.” Retrieving the band of gold from a jeans’ pocket, I slipped it onto her finger. Then I scooped her out of the preacher's arms and pressed her body hard to mine to stem her wound.

  Flames of hazy sunlight filled the streets. All around us, two gangs slugged it out for control of the strips in Dragsville. Inside my best girl, a babe kept on growing in the muddied image
of a Rocketeer and a Fly.

  Copyright © 2009 Kim Lakin-Smith

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  UNEXPECTED OUTCOMES—Tim Pratt

  * * * *

  Tim Pratt's stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and have won a Hugo Award (and lost a Nebula). This is his first appearance in Interzone. He lives in Oakland CA with his wife and son.

  * * * *

  I was lying in bed with my girlfriend Heather that Tuesday morning in September when the phone rang, early. We didn't jump to answer it—that's what machines are for—and after a couple of rings and the beep we heard our friend Sherman, sounding excited, say, “Guys, you should turn on your TV."

  We didn't get up right away. It was early, only about 6 a.m. in California, and though the phone had awakened us, we sprawled languidly entangled for a while. “Hey,” she said. “He didn't say what channel. What could have happened, that it would be on every channel?"

  I thought about it for a minute. “Aliens,” I said. I was seven-eighths joking, but I was always a science fiction fan—yeah, that's a laugh now, isn't it?—and I kind of half hoped maybe I was right. Aliens. “We come in peace,” I said.

  She sighed. “I wish. It's probably an assassination."

  "Probably.” Nearly a year after the election, we were still pissed about Gore losing the presidency he'd rightfully won, about the Supreme Court deciding they knew better than the people. Maybe somebody even more pissed off than us had decided to do something about Bush Jr., but really, Cheney in charge would have been even worse.

  We finally got up, and went into the living room in our robes, and turned on the TV ... and saw what all the rest of you in the television-owning world saw.

  I know it's a cliché, but it's a cliché for a reason: 9/11 changed everything.

  The talking heads on screen were pretty much yelling, but we didn't listen, just stared at the impossible image on the screen. A jetliner—a Boeing 767-223er, we learned later—hanging perfectly still in the air, so close to the side of one of the World Trade Center towers that someone could have leaned out the window of an office and laid her hand on the jet's nose (if the windows up that high opened, anyway). The plane was suspended impossibly in the sky, like a special effect in a movie about a kid with a magical wristwatch that stops time. But even though the first thought everyone had on seeing the plane was “This is like something out of a movie,” it wasn't a movie.

  "Tim,” Heather said. “Is it ... some kind of publicity thing? Or like a David Copperfield magician trick? Or..."

  I flipped channels. The same images were on all the channels, the same repeating camera angles, from helicopters, from the ground—only the yelling was different. “I don't think—” I began, and then the second plane entered the frame from the left, cruising along the skyline with the easy grace of a shark, seeming to move deceptively slowly, and I braced myself, expecting it to slam into the Trade Center's second tower. Reporters on the ground stopped yelling and started screaming.

  But the plane just stopped, and hung there, nose tipped at a slight angle, mere feet from the side of the building.

  And that's when the figure—the one people call the Ambassador, or the Doctor, or the Outsider, or the Professor, or a hundred other names—appeared. Just a middle-aged man in a white lab coat, with steel-rimmed glasses and graying hair. His image filled the air above the jetliner, like the dome of the sky had been transformed into an IMAX movie screen, which only added to the sense of special-effects-laden unreality. “What's he saying?” Heather asked, the same thing the reporters on the ground were saying, and it was a moment before his moving lips synched up with booming sound.

  He said, “People of Earth, I have a message for you."

  "Hi there,” a voice said from the far side of our living room. We wrenched around on the couch and saw a man sitting on the stained old loveseat left behind by a prior tenant.

  "Who the fuck are you? Get out of here!” We lived in a lousy part of town near 40th and Telegraph Ave., over by the MacArthur BART commuter train station, and there were times we couldn't come in through our front gate because the cops had drug dealers handcuffed and sitting on the sidewalk in the way, so a crazy homeless guy sneaking into our living room seemed plausible.

  But my girlfriend put her hand on my arm and said, “Tim, that's the guy from the TV."

  I settled back down, though I was hardly comforted. She was right, though—same glasses, same lab coat, same vaguely affable expression.

  "People of ... this house,” he said. “I have a message for you."

  Later we heard about how he'd appeared all over the world, in everybody's living room, or hut, or yurt, or bathysphere, or mountaintop temple, or patch of dirt. Sometimes he was a white guy in a lab coat, sometimes he was a black guy in a three-piece suit, sometimes he was a woman in a headscarf, sometimes he was a god—he looked different to everyone, and even his image in the sky over the WTC didn't look the same to all the people there. But his message was pretty much the same for everyone. I wonder about those uncontacted, remote tribes in Papua New Guinea and the South American rain forests—how did he explain the situation to them, when they had no technological context for understanding? Or do those undiscovered peoples even exist, here, since they aren't part of the global community, since they were utterly unaffected by the Age of Global Terror—were they outside the bounds of the study? Maybe Dawson and I should look into it, though jungle exploring is a little tricky these days, unless you find the right hole.

  "You have been participants in a long-running and very successful historical and sociological study,” Professor Apocalypse said. “And that study has now come to an end.” He gestured at the TV screen. “In actual recorded history, those planes crashed into those towers in an attack orchestrated by religious fundamentalists. This morning ushered in what my people call the Age of Global Terror. We've been studying the roots of that age by reproducing the sum of human history up until that moment. And now...” He shrugged minutely. “We're finished."

  I think my thoughts were something like, Oh, shit, probably the same as your thoughts, though it's hard to remember what I really felt, then. Of course I wanted to disbelieve, but, you understand. Planes hanging in mid-air. Future-guy appearing in our living room. It was pretty persuasive.

  "Your world is just a simulation, running on computers—what you would call computers—in the far future. That is, it's the present, for me, but from your point of view ... I'm sorry if this is confusing. This is not my native semiotic level. The world you know, the lives you've led, they are ... a dramatization of the past, as accurate as we could make it, peopled by all the same individuals who lived in the real history, doing all the same things their original counterparts did, guided not by rote programming but by perfectly reproduced pressures of nature and nurture, the combination of initial conditions and environment.” Professor Badnews glanced around and pointed at one of the prints hanging on our off-white walls—that Waterhouse painting, ‘Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus'. He said, “Ah, you see, this painting—it's a print, a reproduction of the original. You are the same, a reproduction of—"

  "We understand what you mean.” I was pissed off that he considered us so slow, primitive, whatever he thought. “We're science fiction writers.” Or trying to be. I'd met Heather at a brunch thrown by the organizers of an online magazine we'd both contributed to. “You mean we're living in a simulation. Like that movie The Matrix."

  He nodded. “That is a comparison many in this nation make. Are making. Except ... you have no real bodies tucked away in vats somewhere else. You are nothing but simulations. Like characters on a holodeck, some of your peers have said."

  "We're not real?” Heather said.

  "Not strictly speaking. But, arguably, you are sentient. That's why I'm here. Normally in a historical simulation of this kind, when the study is over, we simply, ah, you would say ‘pull the plug'. But this is a
very advanced program, inhabited by artificial but nevertheless rational actors—by which I mean all the simulated humans, along with some of the larger sea mammals—and our ethics committee has ruled we cannot simply ‘pull the plug’ on your existence. A majority of the committee believes that would constitute genocide."

  "If you're not ending the experiment, why appear to us at all? Why not just let us go on living as we were?” I'm not normally a vocal proponent of the idea that ignorance is bliss, but I was beginning to come around to the argument.

  "Yes. A valid question. The scale of this study is large, as you can imagine, and the resources necessary to accurately simulate an entire planet and all its six billion inhabitants are staggering. Since the study is over, we can't justify the amount of processing power required to continue at the current level of resolution, and so I've come to let everyone know about certain, ah, reductions in non-essential services."

  'Non-essential services’ is a phrase to chill the blood. I imagined dead pixels in the surface of the moon, frozen tides, the sun switched off like a lamp. “Such as?"

  "Well.” He shifted uncomfortably, and I resented the psychological manipulation—he was a projected image, he wasn't uncomfortable, and I suspect he was just trying to make me feel bad for him in his role as bearer of bad news. (Dawson figures I was right about that, by the way.) “Weather is the main thing. Simulating weather is hugely resource-intensive, we've only been able to accurately model such chaotic systems for a few decades, and they take up enormous quantities of processing power. So that has to stop."