by Ethan Cooper
“Memory is a funny thing.”
“Guess that’s why I’m not laughing. I don’t remember.”
“What about the wirewitches?”
“It was a chance meeting. They tried to infect me.”
“It didn’t work.”
“Do I look like a witch?”
A half smile. “No. Hair’s too short. Also, the wrong color.”
“After that, the eoas attacked. Came from nowhere. Don’t know why.”
“Cute story. If it weren’t for the dead eoas and mutilated wirewitches, I wouldn’t believe it.”
Silence for a full minute. “Your turn, Aran. Tell me.”
“Was just taking an early morning stroll.”
“With a sword?”
“I heard the eoas, and I came to investigate.”
“So, you’re just another concerned citizen. I’ll start believing that about the same time I start believing that eoas can be domesticated.”
“You don’t have to believe me, but—”
“Are you a technomancer?”
Total silence except for the sound of running water in the next room. I briefly wonder if Aran peeked in on me during my shower. His head cocks to one side, like he’s listening to something really far away. He goes completely still for a second and then he’s on his feet, grabbing his trench coat. The sword he was carrying before appears in his hand. Is it humming?
“I’m leaving,” he spits.
“What—?”
Aran stops, head turning over his shoulder. “Don’t leave. There’s food somewhere if you look for it.” His trench coat flaps over his shoulders. When it settles in place, there’s a flash of movement on his back—metal emerging through twin slits positioned at his shoulder blades to the song of a repetitive, ratcheting clank. Long, skeletal limbs unfold, rising from his back. From these twin, arcing rails, segmented tendrils hang like fingers toward the floor. Thin flat plates begin to slide down between the fingers, like overlapping scales. Or feathers.
Wings. Aran has wings.
He crouches, his wings stretched wide for a moment before they flap once, yanking him into the air. He gains altitude fast—there’s technology I don’t understand in those wings—disappearing into that dark circular opening in the ceiling.
Okay, add one more unanswered question to the pile.
JACK enters. She’s washed and wearing a black skinsuit. Her skin glistens in the dim light of the room. “Is he gone? Did he show us where the food is? I’m hungry.”
As if it heard her, my stomach rumbles.
14/Witch
2195.12.11/Morning
Sitting cross-legged on the dusty floor, my back against a cold concrete wall, I’m sucking down a colorless, tasteless meal. Gelatinous and slimy, it feels like it’s crawling down my throat. I’m hoping it’s getting the job done. This is the first food I’ve consensually consumed; wirewitches must’ve fed me while I was unconscious before, though I’m not sure how they would have accomplished it. Best not to dwell on that.
Had to search through three rooms before we found a small storage closet that had the box of food packets inside. The closet doors were solid neoplastic, and locked. No problem though, since padlocks aren’t much of a deterrent to wirewitches, even ones that look like they can’t be older than twelve. JACK just grabbed the padlock and pulled, tearing it in half like it was made of paper.
Not sure what this stuff is and not sure it’ll stay down, but it seems to be working. Stomach’s not aching anymore at least. JACK’s eaten the contents of at least ten of the silver packets this slime comes in. Oh, and she ate the packets too. Really odd. You learn something new about wirewitches every day. At least I do.
Now that I’m around wirewitches and all.
Neither of us has spoken since we started eating. After what just happened, I should be craving silence, but I don’t.
“How does it feel?” I ask, finishing off the last packet I’m going to be able to stomach for a while.
“How does what feel?”
“Being disconnected.”
JACK closes her eyes, but answers, “It’s bad. The worst thing I’ve ever experienced.”
That right there tells me a lot about her, considering she just lost the rest of her coven.
She’s talking fast now. “It’s like a part of my body’s been cut off. It was there one moment, and then it was just gone! I keep thinking that if I just try a little harder, I can reestablish a connection. But it’s not working. I keep trying and trying and trying, but there’s nothing there. There’s nothing there to talk back to me! How can that be? Cyberspace cannot go down! It just can’t!”
I agree with her, it can’t. “But it did.”
“I know! I know, but it doesn’t make any sense! We’re talking about millions of servers and interconnected networks. There are billions of hardwired and wireless connection nodes. What the glitch happened? No one person could do that! You could never get all those networks to cooperate in a synchronized shutdown. It would take an enormous amount of effort, even if it was possible to get the entire world to cooperate. It just doesn’t make sense!”
“Does it hurt?”
She’s pacing now, hairstalks twitching across the back of her thighs. “I ache here.” Her hand goes to the middle of her chest. “I need it, we all do. It’s like I’m hungry and can’t find anything to eat! It’s hard to concentrate. You saw what happened to us out there!” She stops pacing, studies me for a second, then walks over to sit beside me. It’s a little too close for me to be completely comfortable, but I can’t be rude to her right now. One hairstalk rests between us, a do-not-cross barrier I don’t intend to challenge. She continues, “They’re all dead because we didn’t communicate. All because Cyberspace was offline, and we couldn’t adapt.”
“You fought well. You all did.” Here, I resist an urge to put my hand on her shoulder. Some inexplicable part of me wants to comfort her, to take her in my arms and rock her to sleep. Very strange. Of course, mixed in with that emotion is a simmering desire to get as far away from her as possible, on account of her being an unnatural abomination.
“Not well enough,” JACK mutters, her voice low and rumbly.
“Why didn’t you just run?”
“Run?”
“I saw you. You’re fast, faster than the eoas. Why didn’t you just escape?”
The look on her face betrays that she’s asked herself that same question. “Only NAAQ could answer that. I’m just a youngling. We assign priorities to everything. All actions and events are placed in a hierarchy that we consult at all times.” She pauses, turning away. “None of us had access to the hierarchy.”
“NAAQ decided that defeating the eoas was more critical than keeping the coven intact?”
“We’ve fought eoas before and killed them, so I’m sure she thought the outcome would be the same.”
“But something went wrong.”
JACK’s still talking super-fast. Is this how she talks all the time, or is she different now? Was it the loss of Cyberspace? Her coven? She’s shaking her head, her hairstalks waving, as she continues. “Without Cyberspace, without the hierarchy, the eoas had the advantage the entire time. The absence of Cyberspace affected our ability to coordinate more than we realized. We weren’t making good decisions, and up against eoas, there wasn’t any room for bad decisions. That’s what killed my coven. NAAQ should have pulled us out. You’re right, we should have run.” She struggles with those last words, as if second-guessing her coven leader’s decisions isn’t allowed.
“You can make decisions without Cyberspace.”
“Of course, but I don’t know if my decisions are the same as they would be if I could still communicate with it. I don’t have access to all the data I normally would. My actions seem logical to me right now, but I guess I wouldn’t even know if I was about to make a wrong decision.”
Welcome to humanity, JACK. But no, you’re not human anymore are you? Not one bit. “How old are yo
u?” I ask.
“I’ve been a wirewitch for thirteen years.”
“What are you implying? That your body is actually older than thirteen years?”
“How old my body is doesn’t matter to me, Syl; I’ve been a wirewitch for thirteen years. Sure, my mother birthed me at some point, but I was reborn. This is what I am now, and that’s all that has any meaning to me.”
She called me by my informal name. Guess she doesn’t totally hate me. For a wirewitch, that seems downright friendly. Doesn’t seem normal. But then again, this is not a normal situation. Even she admits it: she doesn’t know how to act. In this case, wirewitch doesn’t mean what it used to. Don’t know what to do with that just yet. I’ll just wait and see. But for now, more questions. “What was that place I stumbled into—where the eoas attacked?”
“Just a dwelling that we used for refuge when we lost our connection to Cyberspace.” She must see something in my face, because she quickly adds, “It was empty when we found it.”
“And the pulse shielding?”
“NAAQ had a portable unit. Not that it did much good. Hey, I wanted to ask you how you got through the shield.”
“I don’t know.” Not ready to discuss that just yet, so I ask. “Wirewitches keep on the move don’t they?”
“By necessity.”
“You’re hunted.” There’s a part of me that’s sad at that, like I’m somehow responsible for their plight. The fight with the eoas really twisted my reality. The thought of a wirewitch even existing is a scary concept, and yet, they did protect me. Died for me.
JACK nods. “Constant, unauthorized interaction with Cyberspace does upset some people.”
“What’s your official violation count?”
JACK smiles at that. “Four thousand plus at the time Cyberspace went down. Can’t raise that unless somebody gets it back up.”
“I’m sure they’ll do something.”
“Who? The Cyberspace Council? They’re pathetic. I doubt they even have a clue as to what happened. Cyberspace’s been inaccessible for almost a week. If they don’t have it up yet, then I doubt it’ll be up anytime soon. I mean, whatever happened, it was big.”
“It’s bad out there, isn’t it?” I ask, though I feel stupid about it. Of course it’s bad out there.
“The others went out, but they kept me inside, mostly, so I didn’t get to see much. But they told me a little.”
I see it on her face: Even after only a couple of days, things out there were coming apart. Looting. Riots. Murders. Abductions. Rapes. A black cloud of violence settling onto the city. It was bad before, but it’s worse now.
“We’re going to have to go out there,” I say.
“Yeah,” she replies in a whispery growl, her eyelids winking shut, her head going back against the wall. “I know.”
“Okay, then.” Bracing myself for the next question I’m going to ask her, mainly because I’m not sure how I want her to answer it. “I have to ask you something, JACK.”
“What?” she asks, her hairstalks quivering. Right now, she doesn’t look like she’s thirteen. Right now I can’t convince myself she has a –teen at the end of her age. She can’t be more than ten, maybe nine.
“Do we do this together, or do we each go our own way when we leave here?”
Her eyes flip open. Those twin blue spheres of swirling liquid don’t have recognizable pupils, but it feels like she opens up my chest and looks at the measured spasms of my exposed heart. Even through my skinsuit, the sudden warmth of her hand on my shoulder sends little shivers down my arm. Can’t tell if I’m comforted or unsettled by the contact. She leans her head close to mine, one hairstalk brushing against the side of my foot, her voice a mere breath as she says, “I don’t want go out there alone, and you won’t survive by yourself.”
“So…I’ll keep you company, and you’ll protect me?”
JACK’s smile is brilliant as she replies, “Something like that.”
15/Wretch
2195.12.11/Morning
My quiet, exhaled breath hangs in the air.
(shh)
There’s turmoil there, bubbling inside me. Relief and unease tumbled together.
JACK’s words are bouncing around in there, and I like them. She doesn’t want to be alone.
(neither do I)
An offer of friendship that’s as blatant as it gets from a wirewitch. A part of me wants something like that right now, in this moment. It wants somebody to talk with, to make the solitude go away, to convince me I’m here and alive and human. Somebody to interact with. Somebody that breathes. Somebody to just be. I can feel it—a craving for companionship. I want somebody near and aware of my existence.
But something makes me uneasy. It’s not JACK. I look at her, and sure, she’s a wirewitch, but no it’s not that. It’s not her. It’s the change of state. I’ve been stumbling through all of this on my own up until now. I didn’t have anybody on my side—nobody there to care. Now, with only a few simple words, JACK has set something into motion inside me. It’s a little scary.
“I need to know more about you,” JACK says. “Who are you and what brought you here?”
I’m shaking my head before she even finishes. The images coming to me in a stuttering flood. “I really don’t remember. I mean, I know my name, but…I just woke up in an alley not far from where you and your coven were. I didn’t have any clothes. It—it was dark and raining, and my foot was bleeding. Don’t know why. Couldn’t think straight and then I tried to stand and…and I fell and there was…was—”
(…cold / glow / chrome / flesh / contact / warmth…)
“—someone…I think it was Aran…I was on top of him, and I was cold and he was so…so…but he startled me. I ran. Didn’t have any direction, just kept out of the light. I knew I had to find a place to hide. That’s when I met you. You know everything else.”
(but that’s not the full story)
(is it)
“So, you have…amnesia, I guess. There’s just nothing before you woke up then?”
Closing my eyes, going back to my time in the alley, I try to press through the inky black that rests like a blanket over my memory. “If there is, I can’t get to it. There’s a blankness there, and I can’t penetrate it.” But the
(static)
what about the
(static)
JACK lifts her hand from my shoulder. “I’m sure the answers are there somewhere. While we’re together, I’ll do what I can to help. I’m willing to do that. If you want. But if you don’t want to, then that’s okay too.”
She talks so very much older than she looks.
“I’m scared,” I say.
“I know. So am I.”
Her admission damages something within me, and I lose control of a composure I didn’t know I was maintaining. I grab her hand, tight, as if she’s holding me, stopping me from stumbling over the edge of a cliff, opening my eyes and rolling my head toward her. “I don’t know what I’m doing. What am I supposed to do? I know my name and that’s about it! I mean, what was I doing before I came here? I’m supposed to walk around and survive. I woke up naked and bleeding.” A wavering sound that might be a laugh escapes my mouth. “That’s real funny. Naked and bloody, just like a newborn baby—only instead of in a hospital, I get to open my eyes for the first time in a rotting alley, which just happened to contain a technomancer who probably would have killed me if he hadn’t been too drunk. But I didn’t stop there did I? No, I had to go find myself the nearest wirewitch coven in a futile attempt to get myself infected. It’s a good thing that didn’t work or I would’ve missed out on the fun of being almost gutted by eoas.”
“You’re still alive, Syl,” JACK says, squeezing my hand.
The curse word on my lips is released with a long exhale, but it’s directed at me, not her.
This isn’t like me.
(is it?)
“Do you feel any better?” JACK asks.
Not one little bit, unfortu
nately. “Maybe. Yes. I don’t know. Sorry.”
I try to take my hand back, but she resists. “You know, even if you can’t remember what happened before the alley, it’s obvious that you actually do have some memories.”
“What do you mean?”
“To start with, you still know how to talk. And you still know so much about the world. You knew about wirewitches and the witchkiss. You knew about eoas and technomancers.”
“Yes, but—”
“I think what you’re actually not remembering is anything about you.”
“But I—”
“Let me ask you a question. What year is it?”
“2195,” I say without hesitation, because that’s how it came to me. “But not for much longer,” I add. It feels like the year’s almost over, though I can’t tell if that’s knowledge or just a feeling.
“And what happened in 2104?”
“The comet. Just a fragment of it though. It hit us, and that was just about it for us humans. We barely survived.”
“Where did you learn that?”
“I—I don’t remember learning it, but I know it.”
“And in 2133?”
“The Cyberspace Revolt. I think it’s when the technomancers—”
“Exactly. You have a lot of memories, and you’re using them without thinking about what you’re doing.”
“Okay, so not everything’s gone. Great, but all that stuff isn’t as important as knowing about myself! I could be the smartest person on the planet, but I’m useless if I don’t know who I am and what I’m supposed to be doing here.”
“You’re surviving.”
I’m shaking my head. “That can’t be enough.”
“It might have to be for now.”
Here I am…taking advice and comfort from a wirewitch—a thirteen-year-old-wirewitch. I feel a lot older than she looks, but maybe I’m not. I sit there for a second, pondering how old I might be. I feel…
(seventeeneighteennineteentwentytwentyone)
About nineteen. Can’t remember my last birthday event—assuming I had one—but nineteen feels real comfortable, like a soft shirt against my bare skin. JACK is probably younger, but she sure talks like she’s older.
