by Shock Totem
Even though her friend requests are ignored, she keeps sending them. Mort still hasn’t friended her back.
The code could be in the title. Facebook. Eight letters. Two sets of four. The patterned distribution of vowels.
Reference.com reveals, “Face: noun, outward appearance, outward show or pretense, the geographic characteristics of a land.”
“Book: noun, a Bible, text or libretto of an opera, a script for a play, anything that serves for the recording of facts, a set of rules.”
“Facebook: noun, a publication which helps people find and identify each other.”
She avoids her own profile, afraid that someday she will see “Valerie Polichar is dead, but she doesn’t know it yet.”
She is not dead—she pinches herself to be sure. Her skin is developing wrinkles and spots. She sometimes bumps into her husband in the hall to see if he notices. She eats dry foods, bland foods, foods that don’t taste, and she drinks mostly black coffee.
She spends half her time studying how to program, learning the language behind the Internet.
Her spam emails get weirder:
“Whatever kills you makes you stronger.”
“I am strong as a wind or grief.”
Valerie saves them, looks for clues. Perhaps they’re telling her passwords, or giving her directions.
She designs Deadbook, an application for Facebook, colored in tones of black and red, with skulls and a calculator that tells how long you’re probably going to live, based on your age and health and socioeconomic status. Deadbook helps you design your tombstone and pick the way you’re going to die.
The goth kids love it, but other people add the app too. People without networks, people with just one name—people with short circular lists of friends. Some of them have weird, old names. All of them are friends with Mort.
She comes out of the bathroom to find her husband has locked her laptop in the closet.
“We’re going out to dinner.”
They go to a tea shop. It has a twenty-page menu just for the teas and one page for food. They order: Darjeeling for him, a lightly smoked green tea for her, samosas and vegetable dumplings and green tea marinaded tofu.
Her husband, he looks even older now, seems to be breaking under the strain of keeping things light. “You’re losing your tan, we should go to the beach this weekend,” and “My mother wants us to call more often, apparently Dad’s getting worse,” and “Are you okay, hon? You seem kind of sad.”
Valerie doesn’t remember what she says. She wants to tell her husband she’s not sad at all, that she’s onto something big.
She goes to the bathroom, and spends fifteen minutes surfing Facebook on her cell phone. Before she goes back, she sends a message to her medium friend: “Can you come to California? Meet me on the beach in La Jolla?”
Her husband stands up when she returns, his face red.
Before he can speak, she says, “Yes, let’s go to the beach.”
His eyes tear up and he smiles.
She leaves her husband sleeping under an umbrella.
Alistair the medium wears flip-flops and a black-and-white Hawai’ian shirt, an odd one with images of flowers and bones. His cut-off shorts are covered in hand-drawn symbols and prayers: death’s heads, lucky eyes, hands of Fatima. Valerie wants to stare, but he might take that the wrong way. Then again, he might not; he’s been the only one who understands about the dead.
They walk along the edge of the beach and mainly talk about Mort on Facebook.
“Who is he?” she asks.
He says, “He updates his profile constantly, but he only talks to people whose loved ones have died.”
Their conversation trails out and they walk in uncomfortable silence.
“It’s not that I have unfinished business, you know,” she says. “They do. I just want to help people. They probably have unfinished business with other people. What if they’re stuck because people don’t bother to talk to them?”
The medium shakes his head and purses his lips. “When they talk to me, they never say who to give the messages to. I just write them down and put them in bottles I throw into the ocean. Maybe if the messages don’t find the right people, they’ll find people who need them anyway.”
She sighs. On Facebook, she can pretend communication is simple. There’s no mixed messages. There’s no crossed signals. They just never respond.
They talk for another half-hour and the medium invites her back to his hotel room. Valerie declines. Her husband’s waiting for her, and besides, the guy wears flip-flops.
On a drunken whim she messages the mysterious Mort, who still hasn’t added her as a friend, and asks him what she should do.
A spam e-mail arrives thirty seconds later: “the internet, the newest medium of communication! make $$$ in your spare time!”
Valerie tries to analyze it. She plugs it into the Anagram Server site: nothing useful. She pastes the spam link into TinyURL to see what word comes out. She translates it into binary, breaks up the code at points dictated by an algorithm, then retranslates it back into English. Jibberish, that’s all.
Maybe it’s just spam. Maybe the dead don’t talk.
She pours more rum into her Coke and takes a swig (she can barely taste the soda now). She stares into the screen, tapping her fingers on the mouse.
Maybe the dead don’t care if they have unfinished business. Maybe they think it’s funny, hovering in fiber-optic cables and watching the electric signals of grief and love and guilt zip back and forth.
From their bedroom, her husband says, “Come to bed, honey.” It’s a ritual. She clicks to another page.
If the dead are talking to anyone, she suspects, they’d be talking to Mort. After all, they’re all friends with him.
Valerie logs out of Facebook and clicks her way through the “help” pages: Reset Password...Help Center....I Don’t Have Access To My Login E-mail Address. The fill-ins sit there patiently, asking her for her full name, her date of birth, her emails, her networks. She fills in the first two and clicks submit—what the hell. Nothing else worked.
The page reloads, and on it in neat black letters are: Your log-in e-mail...Your password...and the information. Valerie has never seen either before, but she enters them into the login boxes.
Loading http://www.facebook.com/home.php, her computer tells her, and then she’s there. In Mort’s account. There are twelve thousand unread messages in his inbox, and no activity on his wall except for status updates: Lynn Hennessey is dead...Rita Dunn is dead...Jack Miller is dead.
Tentatively, she clicks the inbox link. The messages are all from the living, from uncles and lovers and mothers and friends and distant acquaintances. Many of the names she recognizes—and many of the messages, she realizes as she scrolls down, are from her.
The messages to the dead.
She’s not the only one who’s been trying to contact them. And, she realizes, she’s not the only one who’s felt sad twisted weight in her gut, not knowing whether anyone ever received her message.
She opens the first message, and her eyes slip over the words. Without meaning to, she clicks “reply” and begins to type back. She doesn’t know what she’s writing. She doesn’t know what she just read. She just knows she’s saying the right things, she’s wrapping up someone’s loose ends.
A sense of peace settles over her. All the noises and sights of her house mute and fade until it’s just the glowing screen, ASCII text. She doesn’t feel her fingers anymore.
She falls into the LCD and becomes light and electricity and thought. There’s twelve thousand messages to answer. It’s going to take a while.
The living keep the dead around, with grief and guilt and love. Someone has to close the doors they’re keeping open, and wherever the dead are, they don’t have laptops.
Updates flow through her, new messages accumulate, status updates, friends she’s gained.
One update in particular seems to mean something:
“Valerie Polichar is the ghost in the wires.”
It should mean something to her, but she forgets what. She wonders, briefly, how long she’s been doing this. Then she forgets and returns to answering messages to the dead.
Grá Linnaea is an associate editor for Shimmer Magazine and attended Clarion. He has won a number of awards for his fiction, including Writers of the Future.
Sarah Dunn has attended Clarion and the Alpha Young Writers’ Workshop. She’s from New England, but is currently traveling through Europe.
RETURN FROM DUST
by Nicholas D. Bronson
We never saw it coming when it hit.
The sun continued its attempts to crush us beneath its oppressive heel. My rifle seared my hands straight through the gloves, such was the scorching heat. This was a vicious place we had been sent to kill—and die—in.
And it was no fan of ours.
“Keep it moving,” said Tommy from behind me. “Keep it moving, Dirtman.”
Dirtman.
I smiled. I’d been the first of the new recruits to work out you could stay cooler during the day by digging into the sand. Beneath the flesh-blistering surface is cooler—and sometimes even moist—sand that you can smear on your skin. Desert skin cream, the closest thing we had to a soothing balm out here. We all looked like monsters, with our eyes rimmed red from the sand and our skin cracked and mud-caked. We didn’t smell wonderful, either.
Softly, I muttered the message forward to the man in front of me. “Keep it moving, Bluey.”
As the day wore on and darkness fell across the desert, we tried to shake ourselves out of the malaise. We were behind schedule, but every patrol that went out was taking extra care, watching extra hard, searching high and low to find—and kill—the bastards that did for Robin and his boys not two weeks earlier.
Occasionally I glanced over at Howard. He kept half an eye on a small screen strapped to his wrist—a virtual map that showed the lay of the land, our position and our destination. Despite a complete lack of landmarks, it zoomed from place to place, guiding us inexorably through the shifting sands. It also marked the locations where the enemy might be hiding. Our orders were simple: Fire at will. Ensure no enemy combatant walked away. It was the first order I’d been given since I arrived in this sun-baked hell that I could wholeheartedly embrace.
We paused a few moments at the top of a dune, checking one last hollow that may have hidden people from the satellites that scanned the desert every few hours. The hole was barren, just as every other had been. We rested for a few moments.
That was when the ground exploded.
Sand rushed upward on all sides. Men shrouded like Egyptian mummies erupted from their hiding places and charged at us, knives flashing.
My rifle fired almost of its own volition and pale shock swept over the face of the man leaping at me. He crashed into me, his body already limp and lifeless, and knocked the gun from my hands. I struggled out from underneath the corpse and grabbed the knife that had flown from his hand as he landed. It cut my hand as I stood, drawing a single thick droplet of blood to the surface. It shined for a moment in the moonlight before falling to the sand at my feet.
Chaos engulfed me. I could see more men charging up the hill to reinforce their fellows in the ambush.
It was then the enemy showed a level of commitment that had never crossed my mind to expect. They were smarter, tougher, than I had credited them—and, strange to admit, part of me admired them for that. In the centre of the fighting, surrounded by my friends and enemies, both killing and dying, I saw one of the enemy toss a grenade into our midst. It was a crude device, barely more than a pipe bomb stuffed with nails, but I knew from experience that it would pack enough explosive power to drive a wall of shrapnel straight through us.
I reacted. Instinct. I didn’t think, just fell atop the grenade.
I closed my eyes and said good-bye to this world.
• • •
It should have ended there, but it didn’t.
I died on that moonlit hill, but I awoke once more—alone, awash in noise. The world leapt into focus and colour and cacophony. I stood at attention in the middle of a large white room that seemed more plastic than plaster. I smelled the acrid scent of bleach assaulting me from the walls in a constant wave. I smelled—and even tasted—the metallic scent of the doorhandle, though I didn’t know how. Even more, I thought I smelled metal…and oil…emanating from my own body. I heard, or imagined I heard, a mechanical whine as I pressed my hands hard against my ears.
It made no sense.
Worse than the smells—the mind numbing stench of a hospital, institutional cleaning fluids, and other mechanical odours—was the incredible noise. It was like the entire world was screaming its protest at my awakening. Strange scrapings and a horrible groaning seemed to call to me from the floor, walls and ceiling, as if they were going to collapse and crush me at any moment, though they stood solid and incredibly bright to my eyes.
A door opened off to the side and two men walked in wearing lab coats.
They stunk! Even in the depths of the desert, on patrol with a group of soldiers who hadn’t had the chance to wash in days, I had never smelled anything even approaching the waves of olfactory offensiveness spewing from these two men. The first was rank with unwashed body odour and a touch of urine, whilst the second was ripe with the smell of stale sex. I could smell a woman on him—and fresh—and she smelled no better to me than either of the two lab-coats.
I barely had a moment to process this, however, as once again the noise grew worse than the smell. Infinitely worse. I could hear everything. Their hearts sounded like giant tribal drums that shook my body to the core and threatened to tear apart every shred of my sanity. And it was accompanied by the disgusting sloshing of bodily fluids. With each beat I could hear the blood rushing through their bodies, the acids churning in their guts, the food they ate busy dissolving, and their bowels squelching their cargo toward its final destination.
My mouth opened in a silent scream, and I dropped to a knee, my mind feeling as though it had permanently fractured under the pressure of these unnatural sounds.
The men stood looking down at me, and I heard them sweat. I saw a single bead of perspiration form on the first man’s forehead. I watched it exude from his skin as though through a microscope—in perfect clarity. Every detail was open to me in its horrible glory. I could smell chilli in his sweat and vindaloo on his breath. One of his pupils was larger than the other. One of his arms was slightly curved, as if it had been broken years ago, and somehow I saw the tiny fault in how it had healed. He must have stood there barely seconds but I felt like I’d been examining him for a lifetime, so much I knew about this man.
And then, silence. Blissful silence.
The men spoke to each other, but I could no longer hear them; it was like someone had flicked a switch and turned off my hearing (not that I wasn’t grateful for the respite). I lowered my hands from my head and returned to my feet. My throat felt like it ought to be raw but I had never made a sound. I still smelled those overpowering scents, but compared to the noise of moments ago it was just a mild distraction.
Then I remembered the desert. The cool night air. The blood, my friends dying, the explosion. I should be dead. Was this hell? If so, it was much worse than the desert, and I was sorry for every time I’d ever cursed it. The desert never held such sounds, such smells. Surely no place on the Earth could hold such revulsion. I stared at the men as if I could read the answers in their eyes.
I didn’t like what I saw there. I didn’t like the look in their eyes as they stared at me—appraising looks, looks like Captain Lucas used to give me. People don’t look at a person like that; they look at a dog, a horse, a soldier like that, something reduced to less than human, something reduced instead to its utility. I didn’t like it, the way these revolting…things looked at me.
So I reached out and tapped the first on the face with a closed fist.
The other man looked to be shouting, mouth moving in silent horror, but still I could not hear. He dragged his companion away from me and I found myself wondering for a few moments what his death had sounded like, a face collapsing like that. Surely not worse than any of the other sounds.
I tried to step forward but found that I couldn’t. I was frozen in place. I stared straight down as the screaming man continued to drag the bleeding, headless man across the floor.
• • •
The Hobart Institute of Cybernetics Research is what they called themselves. There was a one-way mirror on the wall of my cell through which they watched me constantly. If I ever tried to break the door, the wall, or the mirror, I found control of my body ripped away before I was able. Don’t think I didn’t try, either; I tried and tried and tried. Never again did I get the opportunity to destroy one of those disgusting creatures in human form, those piles of stench and bodily fluids. Even after they had adjusted the levels on my hearing I could still hear their heartbeats from across the room. It sped up as they looked at me and I could smell their fear excreted through their skin. They fear me, even disabled as I was. I could hear their heartbeats but I could not hear my own.
Not anymore.
Never again.
I was dead. I was not dead. What was that poem? That is not dead which can eternal lie—that is how I felt. I wasn’t human anymore, that is for sure. I had no body. Mine had been destroyed far beyond repair back in the dunes as a patrol’s worth of shrapnel shredded my torso.
