A similar face appears. But this is a man wearing white trousers and a black shirt and glove-like shoes and no jewelry and no eye patch. He stands on the other side of the door, in the hallway, holding his hands in front of himself much as she did. He stares at me and says nothing. I ask who he is. He blinks and steps back and asks who I am. I tell him. And he laughs nervously. I don’t know why I like the sound of laughter so much. He repeats my name and asks new questions, and I answer what I can answer while smiling at him, wondering how to make this man laugh again.
Do I know what I am meant to be, he asks. Which is a very different question than asking who I am.
I have no answer to give.
Then he lists names, one after another, waiting for me to recognize any of them. I don’t. That’s not surprising, he says. I was only begun and then left, which is too bad. Which is sad. I nod and smile politely. Then he asks if I have ever seen anybody else, and I describe the woman who just left the room. That’s how I get him to laugh again. But it is a nervous little laugh dissolving into sharp, confused emotions.
That woman was my mother, he says. He claims that thirty-one years have passed and she barely started me before something happened to her, but he doesn’t explain. This is all unexpected. I am not expected.
I nod and smile, watching him cry.
He wants to hear about the woman.
I tell him everything.
And then she left?
I tell how the patch darkened, interrupting us, and I describe the purse and how she carried it and the last troubled look that she showed me, and what does it mean that I’m not finished?
It means you are small and nearly invisible, he says. It means that you have existed for three decades without anybody noticing.
But time has no weight. No object outside this room has consequences, and this young man standing out in the hallway is no more real than the painted haystacks on the walls. What I want is for the woman to return. I want her weight and reality, and that’s what I tell this stranger.
Shaking his head, he tells me that I am unreal.
Why he would lie is a mystery.
He mentions his father and cries while looking at me. Do I know that his father died before he was born?
An unreal person can never be born, I think.
You were begun but only just begun, he keeps saying. Then he admits that he doesn’t know what to do with me. As if he has any say in these matters. His final act is to turn and vanish, never trying to step inside the room.
But he wasn’t real to begin with. I know this. What cannot stand beside me is false and suspicious, and the lesson gives me more weight, more substance, the epiphany carrying me forward.
Another man appears.
Like the first man, he cannot or will not step out of the hallway. He looks at my face and body and face again. He wears a necklace and sturdy boots and odd clothes that can’t stay one color. He says that it took him forever to find me, and finding me was the easiest part of his job. Operating systems were changed after the Cleansing. He had to resurrect codes and passwords and build machines that haven’t existed in quite some time. Then on top of that, he had to master a dialect that died off ages ago.
He wants to know if he’s making any sense.
He is a madman and I tell him so.
I found your file logs, he says, laughing and nodding. Stored in another server and mislabeled, but that was just another stumbling block.
I don’t know what that means.
He claims that his great-grandfather was the last person to visit me.
Phantoms like to tell stories. I nod politely at his story, saying nothing.
He tells me that the man lived to be one hundred and fifty, but he died recently. There was a will, and my location was mentioned in the will. Until then I was a family legend—a legend wrapped around twin tragedies. His great grandfather’s father was killed in the Fourth Gulf War, and his great-great-grandmother missed him terribly. She was the one who began me. She spent quite a lot of money, using medical records and digital files to create a facsimile of her soul mate. And she would have finished me, at least as far as the software of the day would have allowed. But her son was hurt at daycare. He fell and cut himself, and she was hurrying to the hospital when a stupid kid driver shut off his car’s autopilot and ran her down in the street. The boy wasn’t seriously hurt. What mattered was that the boy, his great-grandfather, was three and orphaned, and a drunken aunt ended up raising him, and for the rest of his many, many days, that man felt cheated and miserable.
I listen to every word, nodding patiently.
He wants to know what I think of the story.
He is crazy but I prefer to say nothing.
Frowning, he tells me that a great deal of work brought him to this point. He says that I should be more appreciative and impressed. Then he asks if I understand how I managed to survive for this long.
But no time has passed, I reply.
He waves a hand, dismissing my words. You are very small, he says. Tiny files that are never opened can resist corruption.
I am not small. I am everything.
He has copied me, he claims. He says that he intends to finish the new copy, as best he can. But he will leave the original alone.
Pausing, he waits for my thanks.
I say nothing, showing him a grim, suspicious face.
But you do need clothes, he says.
Except this is how I am.
My great-great grandma had some plan for you, he says. But I won’t think about that, he says. And besides, clothes won’t take much room in the file.
My body feels different.
Much better, he says, and steps out of view.
Time becomes real when the mind has great work to do. My first eternity is spent picking at the trousers and shirt, eroding them until they fall away, threads of changing color sprawled across the eternal carpet.
Yet nothing is eternal. Each of the haystacks begins with the same pleasantly rounded shape, but some have turned lumpy and ragged at the edges, while my favorite stack has a large gap eaten through its middle. And I remember the straw having colors instead of that faded uniform gray. And I remember the sofa being soft buttery yellow, and the room’s walls were never this rough looking, and the colored threads have vanished entirely, which seems good. But the carpet looks softer and feels softer than seems right, my feet practically melting into their nature.
Portions of my room are falling apart.
As an experiment, I study the nearest haystack until I know it perfectly, and then I shut my eyes and wait and wait and wait still longer, remembering everything; when I look again the painting has changed but I can’t seem to decide how it has changed. Which means the problem perhaps lies in my memory, or maybe with my perishable mind.
Fear gives me ideas.
My legs have never moved and they don’t know how. I have to teach them to walk, one after the other. Each step requires learning and practice and more time than I can hope to measure. But at least my one hand knows how to reach out and grab hold. I push at the window’s blinds, but for all of my effort, nothing is visible except a dull grayish-black rectangle that means nothing to me.
Stepping backwards is more difficult than walking forwards. But turning around is nearly impossible, and I give up. In little steps, I retreat to the place where I began. The carpet remembers my feet, but the carpet feels only half-real. Or my feet are beginning to dissolve. The woman will be here soon. I tell myself that even when I don’t believe it, and the fear grows worse. I start to look at my favorite hand, studying each finger, noting how the flesh has grown hairless and very simple, the nails on the end of every finger swallowed by the simple skin.
A stranger suddenly comes to the door.
Hello, it says.
What it looks like is impossible to describe. I have no words to hang on what I see, and maybe there is nothing to see. But my feeling is that the visitor is smiling and happy, and it soun
ds like a happy voice asking how I am feeling.
I am nearly dead, I say.
There is death and there is life, it tells me. You are still one thing, which means you are not the other.
I am alive.
It claims that I am lucky. It tells me much about systems and files and the history of machines that have survived in their sleep mode, lasting thousands of years past every estimate of what was possible.
I am a fluke and alive, and my guest says something about tidying the room and me.
The work takes no time.
My favorite hand is the way it began. My favorite haystack is rather like it began in terms of color and shape. Legs that never moved until recently barely complain when I walk across the room. It never occurred to me that I could reach into the haystack paintings, touching those mounds of dead grass. Some feel cool, some warm. I sing out my pleasure, and even my voice feels new.
My guest watches me, making small last adjustments.
Because it is proper, I thank it for its help.
But the original file is gone now, it says.
I ask what that means.
It tells me that I am a copy of the file, filtered and enhanced according to the best tools available.
Once more, I offer my thanks.
And with a voice that conveys importance, my guest tells me that I have a new purpose. What I am will be copied once more, but this time as a kind of light that can pierce dust and distance and might never end its travels across the galaxy and beyond.
I don’t understand, and I tell it so.
Then my friend does one last task, and everything is apparent to me.
I ask when am I going to be sent.
In another few moments, it promises.
For the last time, I thank my benefactor. Then I let my legs turn me around, looking at the door that was always behind me.
A second room waits. The bed is longer than it is wide and rectangular and neatly made. Pillows are stacked high against the headboard, and identical nightstands sport tall candles that have not stopped burning in some great span of time. I know this other room. I think of her and the room and step toward the door and then suffer for my eagerness.
What is wrong? asks a new voice.
I turn back. A creature with many arms stands in the hallway.
You appear agitated, says the creature.
Which is true, but I am not sure why I feel this way. I stare into a face that seems buried in the creature’s chest, hanging word after inadequate word on my emotions.
It listens.
I pause.
You are interesting, says the creature.
I am nothing but a file with a name and a few rough qualities.
But my new companion dismisses my harsh outlook. Every arm moves, drawing complex shapes in the air. You are part of a large cultural package, it says, and do you know how long you have been traveling in space?
I could guess, I say. I could invent infinite estimates, all but one of them wrong.
And then it laughs, revealing a reassuring humor. Even this strange laugh makes me happier than I was before.
An eight billion year voyage, it says.
That seems like an unlikely, preposterous figure, and it shakes me.
It explains that it can’t determine which star was mine, and my galaxy barely wears a name, and most of the data that came with me has been lost to the vagaries of time and the great distance being covered.
But here you stand, it says.
I am standing, but sad. My savior is full of hearty laughter, yet I feel sick and sorry and lost.
She is gone forever, I say.
It knows whom I am talking about. It measures my misery and learns what it can from my longing, and then at the end, as if delivering the punch line of a joke, it laughs and says:
But the universe is infinite, and in too many ways to count.
I don’t know what that means.
Infinite means eternal, it says, and eternal means that nothing is unthinkable, and what can be imagined is inevitable.
But when? I ask.
And again, the alien laughs, saying:
Are you hearing me? There is no such monster as “when.”
I am a file and I am protected and I don’t know where I am or how well I am protected. Time stretches, and I suspect that I exist mostly inside some sleep mode, probably initiating only when I blink my eyes.
Once again, the two rooms decay and the haystacks fall apart and I forget how to move and forget a great deal more too.
Beyond the walls, worlds die and dissolve away.
Little flickers tear the walls to pieces, but the pieces knit themselves back together, and I wait, and wait, and then she comes through the door once again. Her clothes are different. There is no eye patch and no purse. But while I am uncertain about much, I know that beautiful face.
It took me a little while, she explains.
She walks toward me, pulling the pins out of her brown hair.
And that’s when I remember what I was going to tell her that first time that we met.
I won’t ever let you out of this room, darling.
I say it now.
She thinks that is funny and wonderful, and laughs.
And in another moment, I can’t remember anything else that ever happened. The universe is nothing but the two of us holding each other, laughing ourselves sick.
ALL THAT TOUCHES THE AIR
An Owomoyela
When I was ten, I saw a man named Menley brought out to the Ocean of Starve. Thirty of us colonials gathered around, sweating in our envirosuits under the cerulean sky, while bailiffs flashed radio signals into the Ocean. Soon enough the silvery Vosth fog swarmed up and we watched the bailiffs take off Menley’s suit, helmet first. They worked down his body until every inch of his skin was exposed.
Every. Last. Inch.
Menley was mad. Colonist’s dementia. Born on Earth, he was one of the unlucky six-point-three percent who set down outside the solar system in strange atmospheres, gravities, rates of orbit and rotation, and just snapped because everything was almost like Earth, but wasn’t quite right. In his dementia, he’d defecated somewhere public; uncouth of him, but it wouldn’t have got him thrown to the Ocean except that the governors were fed up with limited resources and strict colonial bylaws and Earth’s fuck off on your own attitude, and Menley crapping on the communal lawns was the last insult they could take. He was nobody, here on Predonia. He was a madman. No one would miss him.
The fog crawled out of the water and over his body, colonizing his pores, permeating bone and tissue, bleeding off his ability to yell or fight back.
He was on his side in a convulsion before the Vosth parasites took his motor functions and stood his body up. They turned around and staggered into the Ocean of Starve, and it was eight years before I saw Menley again.
Before that, when I was sixteen, I was studying hydroponics and genetic selection. In the heat of the greenhouse, everyone could notice that I wore long clothing, high collars, gloves. I’d just passed the civics tests and become a voting adult, and that meant dressing in another envirosuit and going out to the Ocean again. The auditor sat me down in a comm booth and the Vosth swarmed into its speakers. The voice they synthesized was tinny and inhuman.
We tell our history of this colony, they said. You came past the shell of atmosphere. We were at that time the dominant species. You made your colonies in the open air. We harvested the utility of your bodies, but you proved sentience and sapience and an understanding was formed.
You would keep your colony to lands prescribed for you. You would make shells against our atmosphere. You would accept our law.
All that touches the air belongs to us.
What touches the air is ours.
Endria was a prodigy. She passed her civics tests at thirteen. She was also stupid.
After two years in hydroponics, I graduated to waste reclamation, specialty in chemical-accelerated blackwate
r decomposition. No one wanted the job, so the compensation was great—and it came with a hazard suit. I used to take a sterile shower in the waste facility and walk to my room in my suit, past the airlock that led to the open air. That’s where I caught Endria.
Emancipated adults weren’t beholden to curfew, so she was out unsupervised. She was also opening the door without an envirosuit on.
I ran up to stop her and pulled her hand from the control panel. “Hey!”
She wrenched her hand away. No thanks there. “What are you doing?”
“What are you doing?” I asked back. “You’re endangering the colony! I should report you.”
“Is it my civic or personal responsibility to leave people out there when they’re trying to get in?”
I looked through the porthole to see what she was talking about. I had no peripheral vision in the suit, so I hadn’t seen anyone in the airlock. But Endria was right: Someone was trying to get in.
Menley was trying to get in.
He looked the same: Silvery skin, dead expression, eyes and muscles moving like the Vosth could work out how each part of his face functioned but couldn’t put it all together. I jumped back. I thought I could feel Vosth crawling inside my envirosuit.
“He’s not allowed in,” I said. “I’m contacting Security Response.”
“Why isn’t he?”
Of all the idiotic questions. “He’s been taken over by the Vosth!”
“And we maintain a civil, reciprocal policy toward them,” Endria said. “We’re allowed in their territory without notification, so they should be allowed in ours.”
Besides the Vosth, there was nothing I hated more than someone who’d just come out of a civics test. “Unless we take them over when they wander in, it’s not reciprocal,” I said. Vosth-Menley put his hand against the porthole; his silver fingers squished against the composite. I stepped back. “You know it all; who gets notified if an infested colonist tries to walk into the habitat?”
Lightspeed: Year One Page 61
