Future Tense Fiction

by Kirsten Berg

  (My father loved my mother’s dark hair, the smoke-smell of it, the way it frayed and curled into a lustrous halo around her head. At night, he whispered into it, ‘My blessing, my blessing.’ This was a secret, even from her.)

  The fever came up on her a few days later, quick and hard as a storm. She pressed a damp rag to the back of her neck upon waking, and by evening she lay on the bed chattering and moaning. I stroked her head and kissed her face. She slept, and woke, and slept.

  “Mama,” I said to her. “You must get better because you still haven’t taught me how to make the cake. I don’t know how to butcher an animal yet. You haven’t told me who lived on this land before us.”

  She did not speak, but instead drew a slow and shaking finger from her sternum to her navel.

  When she woke for the last time, her pupils were so wide and black I felt like I would fall into them if I wasn’t careful. It was as if she had dipped below the water’s surface, and in that in-between place she saw everything she had ever known.

  “It was a star,” she said to me, faint as a heartbeat. “The star came and everything moved.”

  “A star?” I asked. She had never spoken of a star, not once in the entirety of my life. Yet suddenly I realized that I had known of the star, that my fears and dreams were star-shaped, that the star had been burning a terrible hole through me ever since the day of my birth.

  “Everything moved to the side and all was clear,” she said. “I could see everything.”

  “Mama,” I said into the dampness of her skin. “Mama. I still haven’t learned.”

  She kneaded my hand weakly and looked at me from beneath heavy lids. “You are my mir—” A mirror, a miracle? The word never ended. She descended into herself and did not emerge, though I lay on top of her, to bring her back from where she’d gone.

  Her absence gaped, and through the wound of it you could see everything: the horror of my circumstances, the sharp cramps of grief that appeared and disappeared and reappeared again. Her body was still and pale, and I kept thinking of parsnips and the way they slept in the soil. I could not bring myself to bury her. At night, the shadows passed by the windows, and I lay breathing and staring at the ceiling, praying them away.

  The third night after her death, something killed one of the cattle. I heard it just before I fell asleep: a wet and curdled sound, like a calf being born in reverse. In my dreams, the star flew over the earth like a bird, leaving a black burning trail in its wake. When I woke, I was damp, my mouth hot with stink and gritty sweetness. Bonnie was sitting on my chest, tail twitching. She dropped a dead mouse onto my chest, and stared at me with serenity and purpose. I sat up and flicked the corpse to the floor. Bonnie dropped down and scooped her paw into the hole in the wall.

  I took a deep breath and lay down on my belly to peek inside. Tucked to the right of the entrance was a tiny nest of fluff and thread; in it, a small pack of baby mice, crawling over each other. They were pink and cricket-small, their eyes dark as blood blisters and shut against the world.

  “Bonnie,” I said, laying my cheek to the floor. “You terrible creature. Now there are a dozen orphans in this house, instead of just one.”

  Could I lure them out, nurse them, somehow? From the back of the cupboard, I pulled the vial of oil Mama had used to try to dispel the mice, the one they had loved so much. When I dribbled it on the floor next to the nest, the baby mice scattered like water in a griddle, as if the scent carried some terrible story. “I’m sorry,” I said into the wall, and left them to make their own way.

  I went outside and stood over the cow’s mauled body for a long while—listening to the flies, watching their beetle-black bodies alight on its bloodied flank. The wind over the grass sounded like the way Mama used to idly rasp the onionskin pages of her Bible when she was thinking about something blasphemous. I didn’t know what she hadn’t taught me. I’d have to learn another way.

  Bonnie was curled up on Mama’s still chest, purring softly. I packed my knife, the sampler she had brought with her from Virginia with the embroidered alphabet, the remaining cake. I kissed Mama’s waxy forehead and gestured to Bonnie as I left.

  “Do you want to go outside?” I asked her. She didn’t move, and I closed the door behind me.

  I walked to where I’d known the edge of our land to be, and for the first time in my life, stepped beyond it. It was still early; my shadow was long and cut the path before me. I could not tell if I was casting it or following it, or if there was any difference at all.

  When I crested the ridge half a day later, I saw a coyote worrying over something in the dust in the valley below. She glanced up to where my silhouette met the sky but didn’t move from her tiny plot. I thought: She must be starving, to not run from me.

  Down among the rocks, I lifted my skirts and waded into the river. The water seized the cotton and tried to carry me away. (Though my mother never said, this was what had happened to my father, I knew. The river wrapped hungry fingers through his trousers and shirt and took him under in half a breath.) I slipped the twisting layers off and watched them float away, like a drowned woman. In that moment, I imagined the bird lifting my eye into the air and saw myself from above—the way my hair was sliding out of its pins, the nature and shape of my wildness. When I returned to my body, I was holding a silver fish who muscled this way and that.

  On shore, I knocked a rock into him until he stopped moving, then dug the sweet flesh off the bone.

  I moved slowly in the sun, stripped down and sore. The coyote watched me from a distance—following me, I guessed. Waiting for me to die.

  I slept with the knife in my hand and woke from the sleep with a bolt of knowledge. When I looked up, catastrophe had been replaced by a sense of ferocious, unimaginable calm. My body bent under the memory of Mama’s weight pressing on me in the dark.

  Above me, in the sky, a beautiful fragment of light rippled through the darkness. It was, like my grief, two things: a bright, white ball of fire and an incandescent, milky trail, both cutting open the night. I did not know it was coming and yet I had known all along. It was awe and primal, searing terror, like crossing a landscape you had only imagined, a landscape you couldn’t possibly have understood until you stood at its precipice.

  Everything moved. For the briefest of breaths, a curtain twitched. I saw the creatures, my creatures, for the first time with clarity: heads and tails like skinks, but the size of 10 oxen. Some stood together, docile as cows. Others gazed upward at the light in the sky. They had eyes like polished stone and teeth like the teeth my mother had once collected—terrible, large as my fist. (They lived and died and no man gazed upon them.) Then I saw a cluster of men being slaughtered by other men, blood spilling black into the soil and illuminated by the star, the air frenzied with violence and horses. (I did not belong here, on this land. The way was paved for me and though I did not pave it, I followed it nonetheless. How did I never know? Had I always known?)

  Then, I saw a young woman kneeling on the ground and working a knife into her breast with the steady rhythm of embroidery, as if she was trying to set something within her loose. She gazed into the sky, and then turned and looked at me, and her mouth made the shapes of words that I perceived though I could not understand them. (The radiance is the passage.) Then another young woman, in a room so white my eyes burned. (I would never live to see her.) Then the curtain fell back, and I felt something slacken within me, as though I was about to soil myself. Everything that I was dropped out from my center and was replaced with molten iron.

  The coyote trotted past. Her muzzle was stained with blood, and a dying hare hung limply from her mouth. She dropped it at my feet and then ran. Its sides shuddered and I could see what was beneath, the slickness of muscle and bone.

  (‘Child,’ the hare said. Not with its mouth, but with its wound; like the singsong of stale air exhaled from a deep cave. ‘Child. Welcome. We’ve been waiting.’

  Behind me, I heard the grasses rustle. ‘Go home.
Your mother is there and waiting. Go home.’

  Beneath me, tunneling moles cried out like a tinny chorus. ‘It’s here, it’s here, it’s here again.’)

  I lay down on the moonlit prairie and listened until sleep wreathed me. Tomorrow, I would be born into the morning.

  If I had dreamt that night, I imagine it would have been with an understanding of the past: my young mother, her pregnant belly swollen with my small limbs and her wide eyes brimming with the dark sky and its terrible star. The chattering animals, the heaving ribs of the wagons, the lying flora and prophetic fauna. The architecture of her spasms, her body laboring against the cold and the loneliness. Or possibly I would have dreamt of the future: a young woman waking from her own dream in some white and eerie palace, a sigil burning high above her, splitting the sky in two. Or perhaps I would have dreamt some in-between place: destiny as a city on a hill. My mother carrying me down one of its many avenues, and then my heavy footsteps as I walk that avenue alone.

  But I did not dream after the star appeared in the sky. I would never dream again.

  OVERVALUED

  Mark Stasenko

  “How was your day?” Jack asked his wife as she took off her black leather pumps at the door of their spacious industrial-chic condo in NoMad.

  “Good,” Sophia lied.

  They didn’t use to lie to each other, not even about small things. Unfiltered honesty had always come naturally to them, despite their glaring differences—maybe because of them. But for the past six weeks, nothing seemed natural anymore. It was strange how much the death of a stranger had changed things.

  She should’ve felt happy, or so she kept telling herself. She had recently been promoted to partner at her fund and shifted her role from short selling to long-term investments. Despite having to pay out 10 percent of all pretax earnings as dividends to her personal investors and an outrageous 54 percent to Uncle Sam, she earned enough to afford the three-bedroom, four-bathroom condo they didn’t fill, the designer furniture Jack shopped for with all his free time, and the bullshit modern art that now just looked like bloodstained, limp air-bags after a car accident.

  But she didn’t feel happy because one tiny, uncontrollable bit of bad luck sucked all the serotonin and dopamine from her brain and replaced it with cortisol and adrenaline. Jack was the only one who saw that bit of bad luck coming. The only one who’d tried to stop it. Even though she knew it wasn’t fair, she blamed him for not doing more. She stared at him as he got drunk on a bottle of overproof bourbon he wouldn’t be able to afford without her.

  “Instead of drinking all day, why don’t you do something?” she regretted asking almost immediately.

  “I wish I could, but people like me don’t get hired to do anything besides work on factory lines or clean up shit after RIA assholes.”

  “That’s redundant,” she mumbled.

  “For emphasis,” he shot back. RIA stood for “rich, indoctrinated assholes,” so she was right, but he was quick too. Jack’s IQ was high, not quite as high as hers, but he was 1.9 sigma above the mean, so certainly high enough that he would’ve qualified for a respected university. It didn’t matter; his family couldn’t have afforded it, and the Prodigy Market hadn’t been around yet to help with the cost of a degree.

  Sophia’s education, a degree in civil engineering from a good school but not one of the hallowed Seven-Figure schools, had cost close to $800,000. Her Initial Prodigy Offering hadn’t raised enough for a Seven-Figure degree (the 13 schools whose reputation emboldened them to charge more than $1 million for a degree), but she was still fortunate to have parents wealthy enough to hire counsel and brokers to manage a first-generation IPO in the newly minted Prodigy Market.

  Jack was older and his parents were worse off, so he graduated high school with no chance. Jack would’ve liked to be a pediatrician. But if you couldn’t afford college, there was no way of avoiding ending up on the low-wage, unskilled Wall-Head side of the modern American workforce divide, looking on enviously at the high-skilled RIAs.

  So Jack, like his parents, was a Wall-Head. He worked in a factory making hospital gurneys and wheelchairs—as close as he could get to joining the medical profession. As it was, he knew he’d soon be replaced by automation, as so many of his friends had been.

  But unlike his parents, Jack had married an RIA. And up until six weeks ago, their marriage of opposites had worked well.

  Sophia forced herself to think about how he was with his elderly parents who’d waited for a basic income to cover life’s needs—needs they couldn’t afford. They’d died waiting, and when they did, Jack didn’t pretend to be strong or controlled or “masculine.” He was angry, uncontrollable, honest. That’s when she knew she loved him. She found herself hoping that she still loved him, but so much had changed in six weeks.

  Six weeks ago, Kathryn Tally Anders died, and ever since then, white lies and cortisol and whiskey and blame had taken over. Six weeks ago, Sophia had never said the name Kathryn Tally Anders, and now it possessed her every thought. Her brain played that name and that face on repeat.

  More problematically, her brain blamed her over and over again for killing her.

  It was so mind-numbingly dull, filling out a W-9 tax form on his wall-mounted Ecosphere screen. How could there even still be a W-9 form? Its persistence in the world seemed to mock the rest of the technological progress enveloping most aspects of life. Then he caught himself: Was this the dullest thought he’d ever had?

  When he started doing contract work, he was told, “No two days are the same.” Those people had lied to him or, more likely, lied to themselves.

  Alex prepped for every job in the exact same way, and this job would be no different from the dozens before and the dozens after. The Iridious security system on his coffin-sized safe scanned his irises in the basement of the five-bedroom suburban home where he lived alone. The door popped open after he was verified, and he retrieved two SCCY CPX-II pistols and their corresponding AAC Ti-Rant 9 mm silencers. He added a serrated 9-inch SOG hunting blade to his artillery as well, but doubted he’d have to use it unless things went terribly wrong. A part of him hoped they would.

  Alex always called what he did “liquidating an over-resourced target,” but in regular English, once shed of all the Orwellian indirections and rationalizations we bake into our use of language, he was nothing other than a hitman.

  The bud permanently in his ear gently vibrated, and the voice on the other side told him they had received the W-9. The job would be listed as “supply chain consulting” on their balance sheet. He’d receive confirmation of the go within 24 hours.

  Sophia’s monitors lit up in her east-facing office at Athena Prodigy Management on the 47th floor of a 49-floor building just as the sun rose. She opened her portfolio and searched for ticker symbol KTA1108II like she had every morning for the past six weeks. She knew that seeing it would gut her, but she did it anyway, futilely hoping it wouldn’t show up at all, as if it had never happened.

  But every morning, there it was, with a total gain of $32 million floating next to the symbol. And that’s all it was, a symbol. It didn’t say Kathryn Tally Anders, it didn’t show her picture, it didn’t mention her death; it was just a symbol on a spreadsheet. Every morning, she’d close out and try to focus on long-term Prodigy investments. Every morning, she hated long-term Prodigy investments and herself a little more.

  Prodigy wasn’t an accurate term anymore. At first, the Prodigy Market, created by a coalition of what ultimately came to be known as the Seven-Figure universities, was only open for investments in the highest-potential students like Sophia—actual prodigies. But it was so profitable that before long any underperforming student or any bullshit, for-profit school could access the market.

  High-potential students could float shares of 10 percent of their future lifetime earnings on the market, but students with less sterling credentials would offer 20 percent, 40 percent, or even 60 percent of all future income to garner intere
st. The market drove up the demand for RIAs, both on the part of families eager to produce them and of investors eager to acquire stakes in them, and the heightened demand further exacerbated the cost of attending the Seven-Figure schools. Universities touted the market as the great equalizer while their multibillion-dollar endowments bloated.

  It was a highly liquid market at the top end, which allowed for an entirely new class of equities and derivatives. Moreover, Prodigies were bundled into PAGs (Prodigy Asset Groups) by banks for a particular risk level and industry cluster (BBB+ aspiring software engineers, for instance). The average investor didn’t even have to research individual assets; they could bet on market demand for a certain profession or skill set. It was a casino, but instead of betting on black or red, the vote was on whether a high school kid was going to be successful. And Sophia was good at making that bet.

  Some high-potential Prodigies could apply for their own ticker symbol. These were much more volatile, potentially more lucrative for traders like Sophia. She liked to short individual assets, betting their value would go down. And KTA1108II had been her biggest short position ever.

  Before its death, KTA1108II was an exciting asset, not just for Sophia but for the entire market. KTA1108II was extremely high-potential, touted on CNBC as one of the few assets that may be ROI positive before its higher education even began. Needless to say, KTA1108II’s market cap was spiraling upward; the futures market was betting that its lifetime worth would be in the hundreds of millions, if not more.

  KTA1108II entered the Prodigy Market even before entering high school, offering up 10 percent of future lifetime earnings. It was an above-average asset: good grades, accelerated particularly in math and science, stable family. But it wasn’t until ninth grade that the asset really hit the radar. In ninth grade, KTA1108II proved that cancer cells bonded to healthy cells behaved differently, and therefore that the billions pharmaceutical companies had spent on laboratory tests of unbonded cancer cells had been a waste. This asset had made a discovery capable of impacting millions of lives and billions of dollars at 15 years old.