Conmergence: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction

by Maya, Tara

  This particular tale was inspired by a bad break up. (Surprise, surprise!) I worked so hard to please someone else that I found I was strangling myself for his sake. I did not explode literally, but I did burn a calendar, in the presence of some good friends, to formally rid myself of the year I had spent wasting my love on someone who returned only recriminations.

  This story is also a tribute to the thousands of women murdered as witches during "the Burning Times." Actually, thousands of people are still harassed and even murdered every year because they are accused of being witches. It’s rather awful.

  I studied Tarot for many years. I do readings for friends and family, and have even done readings professionally. Despite my love of Tarot, and my ability to do Tarot readings, I don’t "believe" in Tarot cards. That is, I don’t believe they can tell us anything we didn’t already know. Sometimes, however, we know things we don’t want to admit we know, or that we prefer not to think about. In those cases, Tarot is useful to jog our thoughts. Meditating over the images can free new associations in our minds, allowing us to see old things in a new light.

  The Best of All Possible Worlds

  Personal Paradise Inc. did not buy ads in the Chicago Tribune or post notices on the Internet. They relied strictly on word-of-mouth. Their clientele were ubiquitously as discrete as they were rich.

  The office of Personal Paradise Inc. reflected the nature of the company: quietly opulent. The halls carried the whiff of affluent men, of cologne, leather and mahogany, but it was art on the walls that drew his eye. Exquisite and unidentifiable masterpieces of famous artists graced the walls, boasting silently: We were made in another history. Glass shelves framed Declarations of Independence to start nations that had never existed, and Treaties of Perpetual Peace to end wars that never been fought. Photographs showed cities where all the cars had three wheels and the pedestrians wore fashions subtly wrong. Despite himself, Dean was impressed.

  Klaas Smit was a white-haired man with a florid face and immaculate suit. His office was dominated by a large photographic mural of Manhattan: a Manhattan with a skyline not quite right, a nude Statue of Liberty, Dutch flags.

  "So," Dean said without preamble, as he seated himself across from Smit. "Have you found me a world where I am richer and more powerful than I am in this dump?"

  "We have found the best of all possible worlds for you." Smit leaned forward over steepled hands. "You’ll be happiest man on Earth."

  Dean reflected on his life: his company, once his baby, now his slave driver; his parents, to whom he had not spoken in years; Colette, grown more and more distant. None of it made him happy.

  Smit displayed a map of the alternate Earth that the company had identified as Dean Vanch’s personal paradise. The map of the other Earth looked like a three-day binge of Risk. Outlandish politics resulted in familiar landmasses with unfamiliar borders.

  "France won the French-Indian wars," Klaas Smit said affably. "Among others. But don't worry -- by the early Twenty-first Century, Napoleon's empire has long since collapsed in on itself. It will be nothing but history for you. Here is where your alternate self lives."

  Smit pointed to a nation gathered around the Great Lakes, between New England and Louisiana, labeled "Acadia." The capital city read: DIESKAU, although it was located where Detroit should have been.

  Smit cheerily outlined the history of Acadia. Like most of the nations in North America, it had achieved independence in the 1830s, trading an imperial dictatorship from abroad for a homegrown "presidential" dictatorship. Because of ethnic tensions, Acadia's fitful bouts of democracy had been pockmarked ever since with military coups and civil wars. Acadia had, in some ways, fared better than other North American nations. Take French Mexico, with 159 coups in 170 years since independence, or California, which, after thirty years of fascist rule followed by forty years of Communism, had no economy or industrial infrastructure worth mentioning.

  In recent years, Acadia, like many of its neighbors, had been engaged in bouts of vicious ethnic cleansing, as the Anglophones and Francophones took advantage of their turns in power to exterminate one another. The country funded its forty-years-and-going civil war with a brisk cocaine trade.

  To Dean, it sounded like Eastern Europe's 20th Century piled on top of South America's 19th. "This is the best of all possible worlds? Weren't there any with nuclear winters available?"

  Smit smiled slyly. "Remember! What matters isn't if the world makes most people happy, only if it makes you happy!"

  With a subtle gesture, Smit indicated the papers on the desk between them. Crisp black on white, legal documents, with yellow sticky arrows indicating everywhere Dean needed to sign.

  The docs describing the proposed journey through the Multiverse were more than twenty pages long; when lawyers met physicists, they birthed a many-headed hydra of nearly incomprehensible techno-babble and legalese. During a previous meetings, which had involved Smit, the company lawyer, Dean and Dean’s lawyer, Smit had explained the contract clause by clause. Clause 21, for instance, explained that Dean would not be able to travel to the alternate dimension in his own body. His quantum consciousness, as the scientists had explained it, would inhabit the body of the Dean who already existed in the alternate reality. Since that world would be the best of worlds for any existing Dean in the Multiverse, Dean would find himself stronger, healthier and maybe even better looking than he was now. But that was just the beginning, Smit had assured him. Every aspect of his life would be the best it could be.

  Dean had a sudden vision of himself as supreme dictator of one of the states on that alternate earth, with palaces, cars, women, and the power of life and death over his subjects. He signed the papers. The only sounds in the office was the ripple of the pages as he turned them, and the scratch of his pen on every line marked with a sticky yellow arrow labled SIGN HERE.

  When he finished, the enormity of what he had done washed over him. He felt almost giddy.

  “You’re going to love your new life,” Smit said.

  "Damn straight. As long as I’m happy, screw the rest. Let’s do it."

  #

  Dean felt nothing during the transfer itself, but a hollow roar echoed his ears. Cold, gritty wind blasted him. He found himself next to naked and the temperature next to freezing. He gawked at his surroundings. Barbed wire. Thin, half dressed men. Sky blown with ash and smoke. For some reason he was holding a heavy rock. What the hell...?

  Dean stepped out of line with the shuffling men. They, too, carried large rocks. The stink of their unwashed bodies affronted him, even more so when he realized he stank as badly as the rest. He dropped his to the ground, fighting nausea, forcing himself to stand tall.

  Pain snapped across his back. He cried out and crumbled to the ground, full of surprise and then indignation.

  "Work, you lazy dog!" a voice growled.

  Dean almost laughed. The absurdity overwhelmed him. A thug in an unrecognized uniform had hit him with a whip. Then anger replaced irony. He recognized a damn labor camp when he saw one. And it was clear he wasn't running it. Personal Paradise Inc. had betrayed him.

  Dean would have tackled the guard. Except Dean’s body had changed too. His attempted tackle degenerated into a wheezing struggle just to regain his feet. Dizziness and aching limbs made movement itself an agony. His body, which had been sleek with gym-worked muscles before the transfer, was putty stretched across bone. That dull pain in his distended stomach -- that was hunger. Starvation. Real starvation, not the damn-it-why-don't-you-have-anything-decent-prepared-I'm-starving starvation he had often bitched about at Colette.

  The whip descended again. Dean Vanch cringed, and felt shame at cringing, but it hurt.

  "If you're too weak to work..." The guard hooked the whip on his belt and pulled out a gun.

  #

  It all took a while to absorb. He drew a deep breath of the clean air in the office of Personal Paradise Inc., which was fragrant with the faint scent of soap and exotic bouq
uets. His body was sleek and strong and he enjoyed the way breathing didn’t hurt at all. He savored his strength, his health, the wonder of it.

  "So you mean that I switched places with my other self?" Dean Vanch asked Smit.

  "That’s correct," said Smit.

  "My parents didn’t die in carpet-bombing by the Francophones during the civil war?" Dean asked in amazement. "Collette was not shot during the ethnic cleansing? I wasn’t sent to a labor camp because I broke the miscegenation laws by marrying a Francophone? My health is good because I didn’t suffer from malnutrition during the Siege of Dieskau? I’m a wealthy man? And you even expect me to believe I don’t need a passport to travel from California to Louisiana?"

  "All correct," smiled Smit. "Are you happy now, Dean Vanch?"

  "Are you kidding?" Dean asked. "If all you say is true, I’m the happiest man on Earth."

  Comment on The Best of All Possible Worlds

  There’s a saying: The optimist believes this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true.

  Public Eye

  "Want to get off the grid," says the kid. Handle: "Monkey-C."

  "Impossible," says the one-eyed man. Call him "Odin."

  "Was told you could do it."

  "No one escapes the Public Eye." Odin smiles. "Trick is to hide so’s when the Eye looks right at you, it doesn’t know it sees you."

  "Show me," says Monkey-C.

  "You know the first step."

  Monkey-C knows. He plucks out his right eye – the cyborg implant that is actually a real-time camera linked to the net. His Public Eye. Everyone has one.

  The grid is everywhere: in every stop light, ATM, subway, shopping mall, cash register, school, business, store-bought item, and in the right eye of every stranger, coworker, relative, or spouse. But Odin shows Monkey-C the tricks of the Invisibles. How to look to the grid like somebody else, like a piece of furniture, like a bot, like a blip. How to map a doppelganger to another part of the grid to throw off the Voyeurs. Months pass. Monkey-C learns well.

  "Above all, have no friends," teaches Odin. "No enemies either. No family. No relationships of any kind. No one with a reason to want to see you."

  "Harsh," says Monkey-C.

  "Necessary," says Odin.

  "Aren’t we friends?"

  "No."

  Monkey-C plucks out his other eye, the left eye – also a camera. "It’s recorded everything over the past months. My exposé of an Invisible."

  "You," says Odin, betrayed. "Voyeur."

  "Friend."

  Monkey gives Odin the public eye and stumbles away, blind, smiling.

  Comments on Public Eye

  In David Brin’s novel, Earth, as well as in his non-fiction, he has discussed the worldwide destruction of privacy. In a transparent society, there might not be one Big Brother, but there are billions of Little Brothers, all ready to tattle on you. (I have a little brother and can relate). Robert Sawyer portrays a slightly more sympathetic transparent society in his trilogy, Hominids, Humans and Hybrids. The cybernetic implant that replaces an actual eye, is of course, a feature of Star Trek’s lovable evil collective, the Borg.

  This is another story that takes place in a world that I fleshed out a bit beyond what you see here. The story that follows, "Walker," takes place in the same universe.

  Stylistically, I had fun with this piece. It was a bit of flash first published in Winged Halo. The word limit was 250 words, short even for flash, which forced me to snip fat. Given my tendency to wordiness, that’s good practice..

  Walker

  On the way home, as I passed the Chung Wah Funeral Home, I decided to turn off the patina in my Public Eye™. I have my favorite patinas—Ancient Rome, Underwater, Darkling Skies, and a couple I designed myself — but every now and then, I just like to see the world without any interface.

  Incense scented the low drone of a Buddhist priest. Peeking through the open door, I could see him, in a saffron robe, at the head of a bier surrounded by red and white carnations. Two dozen mourners in white hoods crowded around the bier as well, doing something I couldn’t see. Paper rustled in their hands, long tapers, which trailed ribbons of limpid smoke.

  I turned the corner to walk up the street between the fire station and the freemasons lodge. The Walker stomped toward me. I knew him well by sight. Though he was the local homeless man, I could not recall if he had ever solicited money, and I wasn’t sure he would accept it even if I offered. He always wore the same thing: jeans, toughened by many leagues of unwashed grime; a sweatshirt, which had once been white or light grey, but now matched the grunge dark of his pants; and an orange and khaki backpack, one of those tough, good quality packs hikers and trekkers use. Every time I saw him, he was walking. His face, worn, like his clothes, but equally tough, never looked unfocused. In this he was quite different from the other homeless person who haunted our neighborhood, the Lady With One Shoe. She was not only much filthier; she always looked like a survivor stumbling away from a suicide bombing in a subway, dusty and dead-eyed.

  This was why I preferred to turn off the Public Eye™ every now and then. If I were looking at the Walker through the patina of Ancient Rome, he would have been blankface instead of in a toga, the Eye’s way to let me know he was just a stranger, not on my friendlist. I never would have realized he was homeless, or dirty, or that I had seen him around a lot, always walking, walking, walking. A blankface is just a cipher in the patina. I’d never have noticed him.

  I studied the Walker, glad to see him, really see him. I wondered where he had to go. Did he walk toward something or away? How many years of his life had he spent hiking back and forth through the city?

  We were walking towards each other.

  Oh, shit.

  We were going to pass each other, and his face wasn’t blanked. What happened if we made eye contact? It’s one thing to gawk at someone from afar, but I wasn’t ready to make contact with someone realtime who wasn’t on my friendlist. And he would know I knew he was homeless, because I’d been staring at him with no patina, which was incredibly rude of me. Or maybe he wouldn’t mind, but how would I know? I had no way to communicate with him, since I didn’t know how to find him online. I mean, unless I spoke to him directly.

  Should I try that? Should I smile and nod and murmur hello? Or avert my eyes and keep walking? Maybe it wasn’t too late to turn my patina back on. But that felt cowardly.

  I decided to go for it. I would meet his eyes directly and say, "Hi." I would do it, I really would.

  He crossed the street in the middle of the block before he reached me, and kept walking, the same steady stride, past a fire hydrant, never looking back.

  Comments on Walker

  Another flash, set in the same universe as Public Eye. In case you were wondering, there’s a reason "Public Eye" is written differently here than in the first story. I wanted to show a tech device that, like Xerox or Google, started as a specific brand name, but became so ubiquitous that it turned into a common noun/verb. Monkey-C isn’t the type to respect the sign posts of capitalism, and besides, his public eye is as much a part of him as the body parts he was born with, so trade marks aren’t going to figure in his story. The uptight narrator of Walker, in contrast, sees his public eye less as a part of him than as a pop culture device he enjoys as a guilty pleasure. He also wants you to know that he has the top-of-the-line name brand, with several after-market upgrades, not some cheap rip-off from Senegal.

  Public Eye is about the impossibility of invisibility in the twenty-first century, and how difficult it is to escape the grid, the scrutiny of billions. Walker shows the obverse: the impossibility of escaping invisibility, if you aren’t a welcome part of the system. Sure, everyone might have a camera on 24/7, but who is to say they have to see what’s really there? A camera does not just record reality, a camera fabricates fictions. The web connects us to everyone (who can afford it), yet it simultaneously segregates us into communities of people who all a
gree to look at the world in the same way.

  Is technology really to blame? Did we have less privacy when we lived in hunter-gatherer bands or small villages and everyone knew everyone’s business? Were we any less inclined to treat outsiders as invisibles?

  Walker is a true story. It happens all the time, though no fancy tech is involved or needed.

  A Thousand Blossoms With the Day

  (Burst)

  10-8 seconds after the Big Bang

  And look -- a thousand blossoms with the day

  Woke -- and a thousand scatter'd into clay;

  And this first summer month that brings the rose

  Shall take Jamshid and Kaikobad away.

  While he waited, he pondered what he would say to her. The matter-antimatter annihilation burst will end, but my love shall forever endure...

  Oh, wonderful. Pretentious as well as tacky.

  I know I don't deserve a sinistorsum like you, but I couldn't help loving you from the first moment my senses bombarded you...

  So trite. Hardly an improvement.

  Before he could think of something else, he felt a gentle patter of sensory bombardment on his back. He turned and there she was. He stared, openly barraging her like a blunt-sensed idiot. She was more beautiful than he remembered. The wordless pause stretched, and he could not stop pattering at her. He knew he should flash words at her, say something, anything, pretentious, tacky, trite, or downright idiotic--anything would be better than freezing up. But every careful phrase he had practiced flew right out of his mind.