“I’ve never heard of anything like this happening before,” Carina said, as she examined the orrery she had come to pick up. The song of her universe was nearly complete—it would be ready to leave her soon.
“I’ve measured and checked. All of the new stars obey Titius-Bode. All of them sing in harmony with the music of the spheres.” It might not have been usual, but it was possible.
Stars tumbled down my arm, and Carina pulled into herself, her chair scraping backward on the floor. “You’ve changed things. That isn’t what a guardian is supposed to do. You are supposed to keep the new universe safe while it learns how to sing. That’s all.”
“What better to teach it how to sing than something that already knows?”
She shook her head. “But what happened changed the song.”
“Yes,” I said. “It did.”
I had grown used to the feeling of a universe constructing itself around me, to hearing the music become more assured as the pieces of it settled into stability. But a pocket universe cannot stay anchored to its guardian, and it came time to let it go.
“It may not work, you know,” Carina said. Her own universe had been recently released, and she seemed curiously smaller without its singing orbit. “There is always the chance of collapse, and who knows how your superfluity of stars will affect things?”
The white dwarf star still orbited in the young universe, and other, smaller stars still fell like rain from my hair.
The escape of a universe from its guardian is much like the escape of an outcast star. One piece is flung out of resonance with the other. I found and sang a note that was atonal to the music of this universe. It pushed itself up and away from me until I was no longer a part of its orbit. It sang its own song, all of the pieces in harmony.
All of them. Even the dying star.
And then. Outcast once more, it plummeted from where the universe had been, falling to the ground, disintegrating and burning itself up as it fell. But even without that star, the music stayed the same. The song did not falter.
I heard the song still, even as the new universe disappeared from my sight and from what should have been the range of my hearing. The music box orrery was playing. I opened the door. At its heart, spinning, a small white star.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KAT HOWARD lives in New Hampshire. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, anthologized in year’s best and best of collections, and performed on NPR. Her debut novel, Roses and Rot, was published in 2016 by Saga Press, with a second novel, An Unkindness of Magicians, forthcoming. You can find her on Twitter at @KatWithSword.
WAKENING OUROBOROS
JACK CAMPBELL
He came down from the low red hills, through the ancient ruins of a city that still revealed life in scattered patches of light and the furtive movements of small, silent people, and finally to the low city clustered around the crumbling walls of a canal, where dark women wore tiny bells that chimed wickedly with every movement and grim men lurked amid the gloom of shrines to forgotten gods.
Where had his aimless trek brought him this time? “Locate,” Oscar said into the night. A glowing map appeared next to him and background noises dimmed as a voice softly supplied the requested information.
“Mars Two, City of Jekkara, Street of—”
“Enough.” Oscar yawned, trying to decide whether to hazard an adventure or just relax.
Not that the choice mattered in the least. He could do something else tomorrow, or the day after, and he had already done everything.
Hadn’t he walked through a Mars in the last few millennia? He drew on banked memory, pulling up images of red men and women in flying ships, green monsters with swords, and shining towers. Nine thousand years before? He had been there that recently?
Oscar looked up into the sky, seeing the great bands of light where other portions of the world were experiencing daylight. He remembered when the dark regions had been spangled with the lights of cities and towns millions of kilometers distant. Now they just showed the black of night. The horizon looked absolutely flat, the upward curve of the world being so gradual and so vast that it was not apparent to anyone standing on its surface. A single winking light floated in the vastness between world and sun. “Wasn’t I once able to see many orbiting cities out there? What happened to them?”
The question generated an instant reply from the world. “The cities are still in orbit. You can no longer see them because their lights have been turned off.”
“Why aren’t those places lighted anymore?” Oscar asked the world.
“Energy conservation,” the world told him.
Whatever that meant.
Smiling around with the calm assurance and world-weariness of someone who knew nothing could really harm him, Oscar wandered into one of the small, dimly lit bars where the dark women waited. What sort of food did they serve there, anyway?
Before he could voice the unspoken question, the dark women and the grim men in the bar vanished. The lights brightened. Oscar stared around and saw only one figure remained, a woman seated at one of the tables. She gestured to him. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Oscar, intrigued and excited by something different, sat down across from her. “How did you do that? It’s easy to mute or freeze the background people, but I didn’t think they could be turned off.”
“Not by you,” the woman said, smiling slightly. “I’m Aiko. You’re Oscar. Do you know how many humans used to live in the world? Trillions.”
“Used to?” Oscar asked.
“That was a long time ago. A hundred thousand years ago, there were only seven left. Now there are two.”
Oscar blinked at her. “But people don’t die. Not actual people.”
“We’ve been immortal for a long time,” Aiko said. “You can’t imagine how long. But people can still die if they choose to, if they become too tired or too bored or simply stop wanting to live. That’s been going on for a long time too.”
Something about the woman’s attitude rankled Oscar. “I’ve been alive for . . . at least a billion years.”
“Pretty close,” Aiko agreed. “You were the last human born. Did you know that?”
“How do you know things like that? How can you shut off the background people?”
“Because I was the first, Oscar,” she said, her eyes suddenly very hard to look at. There was something inside those eyes that made Oscar flinch. “The first to undergo the eternal-life process.” She looked around. “I walked on the real Mars. I lived on a planet that orbited a real star. Eventually, I helped build the world.”
“Build?” Oscar stared at her, then at his surroundings. He had simply assumed the world had always been there. “This was built?”
“It’s all artificial, Oscar. Humanity didn’t want to worry about the random dangers of living on real planets warmed by real suns. The world was based on something called a Dyson sphere, but we wanted it to have a very thick shell, impervious to just about any danger. So, we gathered materials from a dozen star systems and built the world and created a stable sun to light it, and the world has since wandered through space, gathering what it needs to sustain life.” She smiled again, this time in fond remembrance. “We had so much room to work with. And so many years to do the work.”
“Hold it,” Oscar said. “Two of us? Everyone else is background? But I’ve walked through a lot of places. Cities full of homes and apartments and hotels, and towns, and places in the country. You said trillions? I can believe that. Two?”
“When was the last time you met an actual person?” Aiko asked.
“I don’t know.” Oscar frowned. “Why isn’t the memory bank telling me?”
“The memory must have been purged.”
“Purged?” Oscar stared at Aiko again, this time in shock. “Memories are always banked. All memories.”
“That hasn’t been true for a long time,” Aiko said. “Too many people, too many memories. Nobody noticed. A
fter a few million years, most days are pretty much the same.” She leaned forward, her arms resting on the table between them. “But the end is coming.”
“The end?”
“Of the universe.” She waved about. “It takes a long time for infinity to compress back into a singularity, but the world has existed for that long. There’s nothing outside now except that singularity. We’re orbiting it. And because the singularity has sucked in everything else, there’s no longer anything else for the world to draw on for energy.”
“That’s why the lights in the night areas aren’t showing?”
“That’s why.”
He tried to grasp “the end” and couldn’t. “What does that mean?”
“The world runs out of energy, spirals into the singularity, you and I die, and there’s nothing left,” Aiko said. “Ever.”
“That . . . can’t happen.”
“It will.” She smiled again, looking a bit like the wicked, dark women who had formed a background to this place. “But you and I, we can do something about that.”
“What?”
“We can fix it.”
Oscar slumped in relief. “Fix the world? I thought what you were talking about was real, not a game! You had me going.”
“It is real.” Her smile was gone. “The option didn’t exist for a long, long time. But as the singularity grew and became almost all there was, the laws of the universe itself have altered in significant ways. Enough so that now we can make it happen.”
“We?” Oscar spread his hands in confusion. “Why do you need me?”
She smiled, but her eyes still held something odd. “Because doing it will require accessing one of the main control centers below the world surface, and making some . . . significant changes to the world operating systems. The controls were designed so that it requires two people to enter those changes. It can’t be done by any other means except two people with their hands on those controls. For safety.”
“Safety. Right.” Oscar wasn’t used to having to think about things that mattered. Nothing could go wrong with the world watching. Even on adventures, the world kept you from actually being hurt. But this sounded important. Like what he decided might mean something. Though he had the odd feeling that Aiko wasn’t telling him everything.
She eyed him as he hesitated, then reached out, took one of his hands in hers, and smiled again. “I’m so glad I found you. I’ve missed being with an actual person.”
“Yeah. Me, too,” Oscar agreed. Her hands on his felt very good. The world could make physical encounters with backgrounders seem absolutely real, feeding the right stimuli to the brain to provide all the sensations of actual interaction. But some part of the brain always knew it wasn’t real, always knew it was a fantasy.
Aiko was real, her body as perpetually young and healthy as his was. And she was gazing at him with wide eyes as her hands tightened on his. “It’s been too long.”
“Too long,” Oscar gasped as they pulled each other close.
* * * *
The next morning, Aiko led Oscar outside. The backgrounders were still off, leaving the ancient city eerily empty. She noticed Oscar’s uneasiness. “Everywhere else is like this, you know. These places used to have a lot of people in them, with the backgrounders for local character. As the number of people dwindled, more backgrounders were created. Eventually, when energy had to be conserved, the backgrounders started being shut down unless an actual was in that area.”
“But you said we’re the only two actuals left.”
“Yes. Since I shut down the backgrounders here, there aren’t any running anywhere right now.”
Oscar had been wondering whether he should help Aiko. After so many years of whatever he decided to do not mattering, he shied away from the idea of doing something that would make an actual difference. But now he looked up at the vast expanse of sky filled with the world, imagining every place in it exactly like this. An incredibly vast stage built by humanity, but empty of performers. “What we’re going to do will fix this, right?”
“It’ll fix things,” Aiko confirmed cheerfully.
A large sky craft rested in a courtyard where Aiko had landed it the day before. Oscar settled into a comfortable seat as she entered a destination, then sat back as well to watch the terrain of Mars Two dwindle beneath them.
Reaching the proper altitude, the craft shot forward, the land below almost blurring. Oscar saw land he had slowly, aimlessly traversed over thousands and millions of years tear past below, the red of Mars Two giving way to yellowish dunes that transitioned to green fields. Countless cities and towns went by, all perfectly maintained by the world, and all empty of actual inhabitants. The craft barreled through bands of night and day as it crossed vast distances, the dark of the night bands unrelieved by lights.
“We made entire planetary surfaces,” Aiko said, her voice distant with memories as she looked down at the landscape. “We had the room. A lot of different Earths, from different real time periods and different imaginary times. That’s a reproduction of the surface of Ceta, the first extrasolar world colonized by humans. When we made it, it seemed important to commemorate that, but after a few billion years, nobody really cared.”
“How old are you?” Oscar asked.
“I stopped counting.” Aiko turned her dark eyes on him. “Since I preexisted the world and helped code it, even the world doesn’t know. I made sure of that.”
“How far are we going?” he said, anxious to change the subject.
“There’s a spot I’ve visited off and on,” she replied, and left it at that.
Eventually, the craft slowed and settled to a stop in a city made of archaic stone buildings. “This is part of a reproduction of an Earth from a time period before mine,” Aiko said as they left the craft. “The city is called London. There are a lot of Londons in the world, but this is my favorite.”
“The backgrounders are on,” Oscar said as the people and animals and wagons and carriages wove around him, Aiko, and the craft without otherwise reacting to their presence.
“I need to talk to one of them,” she said, leading Oscar down a nearby street. They stopped at a narrow door with 221B in brass letters above it. Aiko entered without knocking, taking similarly narrow steps up to the second floor.
Oscar followed, finding Aiko standing in a room crowded with odd objects. An angular-faced man, another backgrounder, was sitting in a large chair before a fireplace, his hands steepled together as he eyed Aiko.
“You’ve returned, Lady Aiko. Another case?”
“No,” Aiko said, sounding sad, her gaze roving about the room.
“I deduce that you are in a hurry, and that you will not return.”
“That’s right. This is goodbye. I’ll miss you. I’ve enjoyed our talks.”
The man made a dismissive gesture. “That is unimportant. But the world wonders why you consider this a farewell.”
“The world will find out,” Aiko said. She turned and walked back down the stairs, Oscar hastening in her wake, until she stopped at the wall on the ground floor. “We put one of the access shafts here as sort of a joke,” she told Oscar. “Which comes in handy now. Since I’ve visited this place before on occasion, my coming here didn’t tip off any systems watching me.” Tapping a series of figures on the wallpaper, she caused a section to vanish, exposing a manual control panel similar to the virtual ones that Oscar was used to.
“I’ve never seen one of those,” he said.
Aiko ignored him, entered a code, then waited.
“Access denied,” a soft voice said.
“Really?” Aiko, her expression hardening, entered another code.
“Priority access denied,” the voice said. “Require justification for access.”
“Not from me,” Aiko said. As she prepared to enter a third code, the sounds of rushing feet came from outside, and a single pair of feet clumped on the stairway from above.
She reached down and hastily activated a de
vice.
Silence fell.
Oscar leaned out far enough to view the now-empty street through a window. “You shut them off?”
“They were tools of the world, which was trying to use them against me. Against us,” she corrected quickly. Aiko entered the third code.
“Control level access denied—”
“Maximum Override Omega Nine Nine Nine Alpha,” Aiko said angrily.
The wall vanished, revealing the interior of a float shaft. “We use the emergency ladder,” Aiko told Oscar, pointing to rungs built into the wall.
“What—What is that?” Oscar asked as something scuttled away down the shaft.
“Maintenance bot,” Aiko said. “Everything we built has been kept in repair and physically replaced over and over by automated systems, which have themselves been repaired and physically replaced over and over as time wore them down.”
Oscar struggled down the ladder rungs after Aiko, wondering just how deep this shaft was. “Why didn’t the world want to let us in? Why can’t we use the float shaft?”
“Because the world is worried about what I might do,” she called back to him.
“Why would the world be worried? This is going to fix things, you said.”
She took a moment to reply. “Yes. That’s right. But the world is supposed to keep actual humans safe, and when we go below the surface, we get exposed to hazards, so the world is concerned that we might get hurt.”
Something about that didn’t sound right, but Oscar’s mind fastened on one word that drove other concerns from him. “Hazards? You mean actual hazards?”
“Right. Here’s your chance to see what a real adventure is like.”
Oscar had never been out of shape. His body maintained itself in peak physical condition no matter how little or how much exercise he did. But he found himself sweating as he followed Aiko down the apparently endless series of rungs, hearing objects scuttling just out of sight. “Aiko? Is there anything else down here? Besides the bots?”
“Good question!” she called back.
The soft voice came again from all around them, but at a louder volume. “Justify your presence in a restricted zone.”
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