by Kelly Robson
“Disgusting, isn’t it? I bet you’ve never seen so much empty hab. Calgary’s packed tight. Last time I was there, I came home with three detanked infants hanging from my back. Had to get them lasered off.”
Kiki laughed. “I’m from Jasper. It’s not quite as bad there.”
“So, Minh, what’s your strategy?”
Minh stretched out on her bench, making herself comfortable. “We’ll win it with the value-add.”
“Uh-huh. That’s what everyone says.”
“Restoring the Tigris and Euphrates doesn’t make a lot of sense. Mesopotamian climatic and flood patterns have always been unpredictable. West Asia has plenty of viable watersheds. If I were a private bank, I’d choose the Indus River. It flooded on a regular seasonal cycle, and the valley supported a huge population for thousands of years. So, there must be another reason. A sentimental reason.”
“It’s the cradle of civilization,” said Kiki.
“One of them,” amended Minh. “The client is fixated on Mesopotamia. This is their passion project, so we’ll make them an offer they can’t refuse. Time travel is restricted by volume. We’ll take up as little space as possible and offer them the rest for whatever they want—artifact retrieval, tourism, a side project. Or maybe they’ll sell the space back to TERN for their own research.”
“A small team.” Hamid nodded. “Smart.”
“You’re a triple threat. You’ve got three disciplines sewn up—”
“And I’m remarkably svelte.”
“I cover water, plants, geology, and project management. That gives us flexibility with the third team member.”
“Entomologist, maybe. I won’t do bugs. There’s no winning against them.”
Trust Hamid to cut right to the main problem.
“I know,” Minh said. “The arthropod survey is huge. It would take a year to make a start. So, let’s not try. We can use automated sampling for the bugs and hope the client doesn’t realize how important they are.”
“Do we need a third member at all?”
“Yes, or it looks like we’re not serious.”
“A research assistant, then.”
Kiki jumped in. “I’d make a great research assistant. I have three years’ admin experience, a crèche concentration in biology, and I can run a fab.”
“No, Kiki. This strategy requires someone small. Minimum volume.”
“You’re not small,” she said. “Your legs take up lots of room.”
“They compress.” Minh demonstrated, rolling her toe into a tight bundle.
“The bank likes me.” Kiki’s voice rose. “Succession planning, remember?”
Minh looked to Hamid for help.
“Private banks don’t care about hab population dynamics.” He patted Kiki’s knee. “I’m sorry, but Minh’s right. A small team is probably the only unique value-add we can offer.”
The corners of her eyes reddened, but after a moment, Kiki nodded.
Minh wouldn’t have blamed Kiki if she’d withdrawn after being rejected. But instead, she stayed fully engaged all afternoon, making helpful suggestions for possible third team members and sending off queries. She turned quiet on the ride home, though, lagging behind as if she were tired. When they returned to Minh’s studio, she started packing.
“I’m taking a few days off,” she said, stuffing clothes into her backpack. “A temp will cover my admin work.”
Minh crossed her arms. “What about the full-time hours? Your debt?”
“My sections of the proposal are drafted, right? You signed off on them.”
Minh nodded. Kiki ran out the door, backpack swinging from one shoulder.
I’ll be back for the final edit, Kiki whispered. Don’t worry. I’m going to help you win this.
-7-
SHULGI WOULD DIE TO protect his people. He would die to keep his borders strong. He would die if the gods willed it. But he wouldn’t die because Susa disliked him.
When Susa announced her decision, Shulgi’s household was shocked—his soldiers enraged, his wives red-faced and ball-fisted with fury, their children crying, his new wife tearful. She had already been once a widow.
Shulgi let them rage. Even as Susa threatened to spill his blood down the steps, he had to stay impassive, regal, obedient to the gods. He let his people speak his anger for him.
* * *
A temp ran the Monday morning meeting. He stuck close to the agenda, hitting all the talking points and reports Kiki usually skipped.
What did you do to Kiki? David whispered. If we have to find a new admin, I’m tapping you to lead the search.
Minh let her fake answer.
A few days later, Kiki wheeled through Minh’s door in a blue bumper chair. Kiki’s legs were gone, short stumps sealed under polymer caps studded with shunts and drains that threaded into the body of the chair. A life-support goiter thrummed under her jaw.
Minh sat on the sofa so hard it cracked.
“Kiki, I . . .” She searched for the words. “What did you do?”
“Nothing different from you. Except you were just a crechie.”
Kiki’s voice was raw, as if she’d been screaming. Her complexion was ashen, bloodless as charcoal, her bright smile a fading spark.
“Are you . . .” The words came out high and quivery. Completely insane, she thought. Worse than insane. Stupid and destructive and wrong.
“Am I what?” Kiki’s hands lay in her lap, quaking gently like dying things.
Minh looked away.
“Did it hurt?” she said.
Such a stupid, useless question. Trite. Unforgivable. She was probably the first person to say it to Kiki. She’d hear it again and again, over and over for the rest of her life, and she’d always remember Minh had been the first to say it.
“Yeah,” Kiki answered, her voice flat and dull. “Not too bad, though. I have a medtech on pain management and recovery monitoring. You’re supposed to review the work protocols for staff in medical recovery.”
Minh nodded. If she kept her mouth shut, she wouldn’t make any more mistakes.
“If the pain intervention causes a seizure, this will intervene.” She patted the arm of the chair. “I’m back to work now. And I’ll be full speed on prostheses by the time the project starts.”
“What project?” Minh asked. Kiki wasn’t making sense.
Kiki’s skin was thin and dry, drawn tight at the corners of her mouth.
“I’m resident in Calgary now. The bank bought my debt from Jasper, so I’m starting fresh with Calgary credit. If we win the project, they’ll zero it out and I’ll be debt free. For a while, anyway.”
“What project?” Minh repeated.
She wanted to take Kiki by the shoulders and shake her. Instead, she curled her legs around the base of the sofa and squeezed. The frame shifted, cracking again. Kiki didn’t seem to notice.
“The bank wants me on the team. I guess they liked your projection numbers.”
Minh winced. Kiki had mutilated herself because of imaginary numbers—numbers Minh had made up.
“Where’s Hamid?” Kiki asked. “I need to talk to both of you.”
Kiki flicked a shaking hand. Hamid’s fake appeared in the middle of the studio. Hat, chaps, and all.
Override, Minh told it. Hamid, get here right now. Emergency. No fucking fakes.
The fake’s cheesy costume faded. Its blank expression blossomed into a grin as Hamid took over. He opened his mouth, then caught sight of Kiki.
His face fell.
“Oh, Kiki. Your perfect fat baby body. What did you do?”
“What I had to.” Kiki backed up her chair and faced them both. “In addition to my admin experience and crèche-level biology, I’m a fabrication technologist with more than four thousand hours of experience fabbing construction components in Jasper.”
She shot Minh’s draft work plan into the center of the room. A blue-highlighted constellation of items flashed as they scrolled by.
“T
he work breakdown is swarming with fab tasks,” she said. “People think fabbing is brainless work. They think you can load a recipe and walk away, but you can’t. It’s not as easy as it looks, especially on a tight deadline. Efficient fab management requires attention and experience.”
The bumper chair beeped softly. Kiki fished a pouch of hydration fluid out of a cubby in the arm rest, poked a straw through its seal, and sipped.
“More importantly,” she continued, “Minh and I work well together in close quarters. I’m completely dedicated to the success of the project. I’ll do anything to make it work. I think I’ve proved that.”
Hamid’s eyes glimmered. Minh turned to the window and wiped the sleeve of her coverall over her damp brow.
“You both think I’m crazy,” Kiki said. “I’m not. I’m fine. All I did was exercise autonomy over my health decisions, like you plague babies do.” Kiki forced her pained smile brighter. “My volume is now slightly less than one and a half cubic meters. I want to be on this team, Minh. I’m willing to do whatever it takes.”
Minh scrubbed her palms over her eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said. It came out a whine.
“Tell you what?” Hamid snarled. “What did you want her to say? ‘Put me on the team or I’ll cut my legs off’? You’d have told David to fire her. But now you have no choice. You have to put her on the team.” He dashed away the tears and grinned. “It’s diabolical, Kiki. I’m proud of you.”
“What if we don’t win?” asked Minh.
“Then we’ll win the next one,” said Kiki. “Life is long.”
* * *
Kiki offered to get a sleep stack, but Minh wasn’t going to let her rack up debt renting space by the hour. She mulched her sofa to make room for Kiki’s chair. Minh liked sleeping in the hammock, and the sofa’s frame was beyond repair, anyway.
The day after they delivered the proposal, Kiki started rehab. She wheeled out of the studio in the mornings, dragged herself back home six hours later to do a little admin work, and then fell into sleep so deep it looked like death.
Kiki’s spirits climbed as she recovered, but Minh’s plunged. All her regular project work felt dull in comparison to the time travel project. Repetitive, pointless reiterations and reexaminations of ecological management decisions made thirty or forty years earlier. Did Iceland really need another review of a successful valley restoration project, or were they throwing Calgary a bone? Did Cusco really want a resculpt of their glacier field, or were her friends trying to keep her busy?
Iceland had fifty restored valleys. Cusco’s glaciers were constantly on the move. Minh couldn’t face the idea of repeating the same projects for the rest of her life just to prove her value to the Bank of Calgary.
Instead of logging billable hours, she updated her old Tuk-U lectures. She sent a battery of cameras up the Bow River to trap fresh doc footage to supplement her simulation models and demonstration materials. And she worried about Kiki. Every hour, Minh pinged Kiki’s biom to confirm she hadn’t hemorrhaged out.
Each time, Kiki’s biom was the same—green-alive. But between green-alive and red-dead was a world of pain. She knew what Kiki was going through.
Minh’s blood pressure swung wildly, far worse than usual. When one of her teratomas sprung a bleed, Minh’s medtech claimed the problem wasn’t entirely physiological and recommended a therapist. The fourth time the medtech mentioned therapy, Minh fired her.
Minh ignored her project deadlines until the last minute, and delivered the final reports late. When Iceland offered her a set of new adaptive management reviews, she forwarded them to David.
I need a break, she told him.
Minh retreated to Crowchild Terrace and finished pruning the entire orchard herself.
When the interview notice arrived from the Mesopotamian Development Bank, Kiki was away at a medical engineering appointment, having her training prostheses installed. As Minh fired the client an acknowledgement, her blood pressure soared, then plunged. Minh nearly passed out. She climbed into her hammock, pulled her legs into a tight ball, and waited.
Kiki tottered through the door on two squat, thick training prostheses and grinned up at her.
“I’m shorter than you now,” she said. Then she checked the queue and fired the notice into the middle of the studio, triumphant.
Minh burrowed deeper into her hammock and watched the client’s administrative fake deliver the message. Minh’s biom surged into the red. Blood pressure through the ceiling. Pinpoint hemorrhages in her liver and esophagus. If Minh hadn’t dismissed her medtech, the situation would already be under control. Now, if she wanted medical assistance, she’d have to ask for it. But she hated asking for help.
“They want us to interview in Bangladesh Hell,” Kiki said. “Amazing. You know I’ve never been anywhere?”
Prostheses clanged on the floor as Kiki danced around the studio.
“Interview notices are always so dispassionate. They never really say anything. It’s like they don’t want you to get your hopes up. And what’s up with that admin fake? Face like a dinner plate.”
“I don’t know.” Minh turned toward the window and fixed her gaze on the cold mountains in the distance. “I guess it’s a custom design.”
“We’re going to win, you know.”
“Maybe.”
Kiki laughed. “Come on. Aren’t you excited?”
Minh lowered herself to the floor and scuttled into the bathroom.
“What do we do now?” Kiki shouted through the door.
Minh pretended not to hear.
Small bleed in her left sphenoid sinus. Her cheekbone burned as clotting agents rushed in to stop the flow. A drop of blood splattered on the tiles, then another on the edge of the shower drain. If she didn’t control her blood pressure, she’d pop a thrombosis. And with no medtech agreement in place, it’d be a quick slide from palliative care to the mulch.
Minh reached into her biom and tweaked her hormonal mix, dialing herself down until a cold calm settled over her like a new skin.
It was a dangerous habit, hard on the endocrine system. For most of Minh’s life, she’d tweaked the dials compulsively, unable to resist the temptation to optimize her state of mind—control moods, enhance concentration, keep alert, awake, and productive. For a long time, it worked, but years of abuse had damaged her angiotensin and aldosterone response, making her blood pressure wildly irregular.
When her diagnosis had been finalized, Minh’s medtech had yelled at her for twenty minutes straight. All Minh could do was listen and nod. She’d hurt herself. Badly.
So, she’d stopped playing with her endocrine system. Hadn’t touched the dials in nearly two years. Probably shouldn’t now, but she needed it. She had to stay under control.
Minh slathered cleansing cream on her face and scoured it off with steady hands. Her biom flashed green.
She stared at herself in the mirror, poking at the pouches under her eyes with a fingertip. She was okay. Next time she got a bleed, she’d let a professional deal with it. Nothing in Minh’s life was going to change because a fat baby made an impulse decision on a body mod.
When she left the bathroom, Kiki was talking with Hamid.
“Getting the interview is nothing,” he said. “The shortlist includes at least three teams.”
Kiki laughed. “You can’t say that. It’s not nothing!”
“If we don’t win, how much debt will you have in six months?” Kiki looked away. “Right. So, here’s your first interview question: Kiki, why do you want to time travel?”
Kiki didn’t even think before answering, “Who wouldn’t want to time travel? It’s the ultimate adventure.”
“Zero points.” Hamid turned to Minh. “Why do you want to time travel?”
“The Mesopotamian ecological system is the foundational habitat for the development of modern human societies,” Minh said, falling into standard interview mode. Confident but deferential, completely trustworthy.
“In my sixty years as an ecological remediation specialist, this project is unprecedented. It provides a unique opportunity to take the first concrete step in restoring an ecosystem using past-state data observed, monitored, and gathered on-site.”
“Good. You see what Minh did there?”
Kiki shook her head.
“Minh told the client they have the prettiest gonads and she’s the best possible person to bring their project off. Want to try again?”
Kiki stumped around the studio, thinking.
“I’m at the beginning of my life,” Kiki said, finally. “When time travel became a reality, I was in the crèche. Over the past ten years, time travel has been used for a lot of things, but it’s never been used for the most important work of all—restoring productive ecosystems so they can support the population growth my generation represents. This project is the first step.”
Hamid coughed. Kiki backtracked. “This project will prove past-state monitoring is the best and highest possible use of time travel technology.”
“Not bad,” Hamid said. “Stay away from the me-me-me. Clients want you to talk about them.”
“I didn’t realize we needed to make the client feel good about themselves. It seems dishonest.”
“This is a seduction,” Hamid said. “If you want to time travel, we need to get the client in bed with us.”
-8-
BEFORE SHULGI LEFT THE temple, he had to perform the parting ritual. Shulgi took Susa’s hand, as was his duty, and Susa led him to Inanna’s bed, as was her duty. There, they honored the gods. Shulgi swallowed his anger and put as much reverence into the act as he could muster. Susa made no attempt to bridle her hatred. With her nails and teeth, she drew as much blood from him as she could.
Meanwhile, Shulgi’s eldest wife argued with the priests. She was a former moon priestess, gray-haired and venerable, a practiced orator who knew all the weaknesses and foibles in the temple precincts. The priests agreed to wait for more signs, more portents.
They didn’t have to wait long.
* * *
Minh, Hamid, and Kiki skipped from Calgary to Iceland, Iceland to Surgut, then Surgut to Bangladesh. From hab to hab to hive to hell.
