Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld (Clarkesworld Anthology)

by Tim Pratt

  I don’t know where he lives in my body. Surely what feels like him winding, wormlike, many-footed and long-antennaed through the hallways of my lungs, the chambers of my heart, the slick sluiceway of my intestines—surely the sensation is him using his telekinetic palps to engage my nervous system. I think he must be curled, encysted, an ovoid somewhere between my shoulder blades, a lump below my left rib, a third ovary glimmering deep in my belly.

  He says, You could go out with TICK a bang, you could leap into TICK the heart of a furnace or dive TICK from a building’s precipice, before they put you TICK in a zoo with a sign on the wall TICK, “Last Homo Sapiens.” Last Fleshbag. Last Body.

  I do not reply. I gather my clothing back to myself and shrug my shoulders underneath the layers, hiding. He flows back and forth, like a scissoring centipede, driving himself along my veins.

  In the kitchen, I stuff food in my mouth without thinking about it, wash it down with gulps of murky fluid from the decanter I fill each night from the river. The liquid glistens with oily putrefaction as it pours through my system.

  He says, You disgust me. There are TICK hairs growing inside your body, there TICK are lumps of yellow fat, there are TICK snot and blood clots and bits of refuse TICK. Why won’t you die and set me free?

  If only I could wash him away, I’d wallow by the riverside, mouth agape in the shallows, swallowing, swallowing bits of gravel and rusted bolts and the tinny taste of antique tadpoles.

  I can’t, but even so he doesn’t like the thought. He saws at the back of my skull with fingers like grimy glass, until the bare bulb shining above the kitchen table shatters, rains down in shards of migraine light, my vision splintering into headache.

  When I sleep, I lie down on a shelf beneath the window on the upper floor. I don’t know who used to live in this house—when I found it, the only closet was full of desiccated beetles and rows of blue jars. I fold the spectacles I wear—two circles of glass and brass that I found in a drawer. I set them on the windowsill with the drawing of a clock face I have made. I slide my eyelids closed.

  Even asleep, I can feel my parasite whispering to himself, thoughts clicking and ticking away. Turning the circuitry and gears of my brain for his own use.

  I dream that I am dreaming I’m not dreaming.

  The morning sky unfolds in the window, mottled crimson and purple, like marbled bacon, speckled sausage. Brown clouds devour it to the sound of morning shuffling. I get up. I take the mass transit, I go to the store and buy replicas of food, the same pretense everyone else makes, mourning the regularities of a lost life. I stand on a street corner with a pack of robots, looking at a wall screen. A few are clothed, but most are bare, moisture beading on their chrome and brass forms. Some are sleek, some are retro. No one is like me.

  I walk in the park. Where did all these robots come from? What do they want? They look like the people that built them, and they walk along the sidewalk, scuffed and marred by their heavy footsteps. They pretend. That’s the only thing that saves me, the only thing that lets me walk among them pretending to be something that is pretending to be me.

  I sit on a bench by the plaza’s edge, a bend of concrete, splotched with lichen. Little sparrows hop along the back, nervous hops, turning their heads to look at me, one beady eye, then the other. I hold my hand out, palm upward. One hops closer.

  Inside my ears, inside my lungs, vibrating inside my bones, I hear him whispering. He tells me where I could throw my body in front of a tram, where I could undermine a bridge, where I could leap in a shower of glass, where I could embrace a generator.

  The sparrow lands popcorn-light on my palm. My fingers close over it. The other sparrows panic and fly away as my hand clenches tighter and tighter, latching my thumb over the cage my hand has become, feeling the crunch beneath the fluff.

  My fingers spasm before my thumb swings away to let them open. Tiny gears fall and bounce on the concrete, and fans of broken plastic feathers flutter down. I stand and try to walk away, but he keeps talking and talking in my head.

  You disgust me, he says, and then for once he is silent, as another presence intrudes, as something touches my arm. It is the creature that raised me, it is my mother robot, made of lengths of copper tubing and a tank swelling for a bosom. Carpet scraps are wrapped around its wrists and ankles. It says through the grillework, its beetle-like mouth hissing and crackling with static. You are not well, you must come home with me, won’t you come home with me? I worry about you.

  How can robots worry? I shake my skull, I turn away so it won’t see the meat, the flesh, the body.

  You don’t know what you’re doing, who you are, what you are, it says. The voice is flat, emotionless. It stops, then begins again. You are wrong, it says. Something inside of you is wrong.

  It pulls at me again, but I brace myself and it cannot budge me. It walks away and does not look back. It will come tomorrow and say the same words.

  He begins in my head again and I make it only a few steps before crouching down in the middle of the plaza, feeling the passing robots stare at me. I must master this, must master him before the Proctors come and discover me.

  I say to the insides of my wrists, the delicate organic bones of my wrists, clothed in blood and sinew, Listen to me, listen to me. Let me get home, home to safety and I’ll give you what you want, whatever you want.

  He releases his grip on my sanity and we walk home quietly. I eat and drink and say What do you want?

  Sleep, he says, and for once the voice is gentle. That’s all. Go to sleep. Things will be better in the morning.

  At half past midnight, I open my eyes. On the floor are legs torn from an LED bug, dried shells, silver scraps. I watch and he lifts one, then another, drifts and clicks so quiet I cannot hear them. One, then another, and then both. As though he was practicing. As though he was getting better. Stronger.

  I didn’t know he could use his telekinesis outside my body. As the last shell falls, I feel him lapse, exhausted, into his own simulacrum of sleep.

  Downstairs there are no knives in the kitchen, but there is a piece of metal molding that I can peel away from the counter’s edge. Slipping and sliding across the floor and the fungus growing on the ancient bits of food scattered there, I go into the living room, an empty box like every other room here, but here the walls are red, red as blood. The blood I imagine, over and over, in my veins.

  I poise the knife before my belly and I say goodbye to my body, to the burps and the shit, to the unexpected moles and the cramps and the itches, and flakes of skin and hot sore pimples. To my good, hallucinatory-rich flesh. To my bones that have pretended to carry me for so long. To my delusive blood.

  He wakes and says What are you doing? And No. Even as the length of metal slides into me, and I look down to see my foil skin sliding away, to reveal my secret’s secret to the world, to show my gears and cogs and shining steaming lunatic wires, and in the midst of it, the clockwork centipede uncoiling, he is my brain seeing itself uncoiling and recoiling and discoiling, my mechanical, irrational brain saying No and No and No again.

  Cat Rambo lives and writes beside eagle-haunted Lake Sammammish in the Pacific Northwest. She has had over two dozen stories published in venues that include Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, and Chiaroscuro. Her second collection, Eyes Like Smoke and Coal and Moonlight, was published last year by Paper Golem Press. She is a member of the writers’ groups Horrific Miscue and Codex. She holds an MA in fiction from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and was a member of the Clarion West class of 2005.

  CAN YOU SEE ME NOW?

  Eric M. Witchey

  Two miles of sea water overhead pretty well filtered out the ill effects of sunlight and mankind. Alone in her hard suit, lights on for safety, Lori’s boots settled and held in the pale, diatomaceous silt cover over the San Bernardino Highway. Helmet speakers trickled distant Vivaldi into her ears, and her feeder tube pumped nutrients in accordance with strict protocols for preservation of cultura
l authenticity. She’d gotten the job because she fit the restored hard suit and because her body was a perfect museum piece, a monument to the ancient submerged civilization of Los Angeles.

  She was forty minutes out on her commute after leaving suburb dome one. She knew the route well enough. She walked it every day of the week except Sixth and Seventh. Evenings, Sixth, and Seventh she did H&H, Home-and-Hearth duty, in her Hollywood bungalow diorama.

  First through Fifth, she did commute and hard-shell welding on oil pumps.

  Her equipment was archaic. The cumbersome hard shell suit with its jutting bumpers and lights made for a slow commute, and sometimes she’d let herself keel over just to demonstrate how hard it must have been for ancient Angelinos to go to work every day—millions of them. No wonder traffic had often halted for hours at a time.

  No matter how many times she read the old texts, data from laser-etched, polymer, digital disc fragments discovered in the silt, she couldn’t really imagine millions of people. Nobody could really imagine millions of people on the highway in hard suits, bumper-to-bumper, stretched up and down the highway heading off to serve in the major industries of the time: making films, drilling wells, making wars, and selling drugs. It was her job to represent all of them.

  Sometimes, on special occasions—translate, when people who influenced funding came to inspect the cultural preserve—there would be five or six other hard suits on the highway.

  Once, because of her careful and realistic stumbles, she’d been chosen to work with the famous decryptologist, Doctor Argos Chew. For six months, she worked side-by-side with the man who had first figured out how to read the ancient texts. They actually simulated a fender bender, including the road rage firefight and celebratory goat barbeque.

  Not today, though. Today, she was on her own like most days; and she was, like most days, going to weld a support spar on a pipe fitting for upstream production of fossil fuels.

  She flipped on her brights. The expected circle of white light appeared. An oarfish undulated slowly through her field of vision. Several tube worms retracted into the smooth, pale silt. The rocking, seahorse shape of an oil well pump, her destination, loomed ahead of her. By the numbers, she hit her turn signal, lit up her tail lights, and plodded along the restored off ramp.

  “Lori.” The word appeared on the cell phone view of her faceplate display. She held her hand to her head like the texts said she would have.

  The words scrolled across her faceplate. “Solo?”

  “Yes,” she said. The words appeared in a separate response line. “Who?”

  “Aaron here.”

  “What?”

  “GTTP?”

  “Got Time To Play, NOT.” She moved up to her favorite pipe fitting, one that would allow full view of her work if there were any visitors to the observation domes or remote library viewing centers.

  While appearing to clean the pipe fitting, she looked over the fusion splitter box at the base of the rocker pump. It provided the power to keep the pump rocking up and down like a steel seahorse bobbing for plankton. Tiny bubbles streamed up from the box, the oxygen by-product of sucking in sea water and separating hydrogen from oxygen.

  The pump would rust and turn to silt before that little box gave up trying to convert the ocean into hydrogen fuel. It would run forever if nobody recycled it.

  She ignited her torch finger. Her face plate darkened to filter out the blinding glare of her torch, and she set her finger to the pipes.

  “Don’t be like that, babe.”

  “Your babe, NOT,” she answered. Aaron was not part of the preserve. He was illegal, and he broke in on her channel while she worked. He tried to pretend he was part of the time/place illusion.

  “Mall noon Starbucks?”

  She almost broke character to laugh. Like he could get into the preserve. Still, he was on channel now, and she was working, and somebody might be watching today.

  “Venice Beach noon. Skating. Sorry.”

  “Meet sweet. Skate 4 2?”

  “Natch.”

  “Sweat and wrestle steady?”

  “Your business, NOT,” she said. “WORK-ing.”

  “Suit hot?” he asked.

  She knew where he was going. Phone sex was not part of her work script. No matter that Doctor Argos said all California Girls loved to have phone sex and got paid for it. No matter that she was considered an expert because she had practiced with Argos.

  Today, she wanted to be alone. She had hoped for the quiet place she only found in her hard suit while welding.

  “Gawd, Aaron,” she said. “1 track mind.”

  “Luvly Lori. 1 track. Repeat play 4ever.”

  “Buh-bye.” She hung up. Vivaldi ended. Cold, green silence filled her helmet. She switched off her welder and lights and let the darkness of the deeps embrace her. Heartbeats echoed in her ears, and the cold outside her suit made tiny inroads into her flesh.

  In the silence, she wondered what Aaron’s life must be like. She wondered why he wanted to talk to a historian like her at all. He went to some trouble to make his illegal calls.

  She pretended to adjust her welding finger, as if her reproduction could actually break.

  He must have one of those high-stress jobs—likely a Progeny Projection Consultant or a Future Futures Trader—one of those guys who sold his brain early on and lived in the ether full-time. Maybe he had no body at all.

  Phone sex wasn’t so bad, really. Sometimes on Bungalow duty she performed with her polymates. Terry, their norm geek-hubby, was pretty good at it. Anella, their bisubmissive accountant, was a true artist, though she wasn’t recognized for her work because she didn’t have Lori’s credentials.

  She finished yaddaing her welder, checked her time out heads-up, and turned back toward the preserve dome complex. Twenty minutes of actual work was all the people of LA were allowed before they had to commute again.

  Sometimes, she wished she could stay out forever, and sometimes she thought she might. She had a theory that the Angelinos would have too, and that was why they were only allowed to work for twenty minutes a day.

  Going back to the noise and crowds of the domes and towers wasn’t the part of historical research that she liked. Still, she turned. She walked, trudged, and even threw in a potentially traffic snarling fall just in case somebody was watching her. She had to keep her rep as an obsessive for authentic detail.

  H&H duty on Sixth: script said she was alone all day. Three-way phone sex at lunch. Waiting for Cableguy. Computer crashing. Neighborhood watch gunfight. Sixth was a no-brainer. Normal Angelino day. Mostly, she got to spend it eating, pacing, and cursing Cableguy—well, at least after ten she got to curse Cableguy.

  By ten, she was up, caffeinating, and pacing in her terrycloth robe. She’d brushed her blond hair out so it feathered over her shoulder blades the way it was supposed to. Her sun bleaching was in. She was in the groove, and she hoped somebody was watching today, somebody to make all her research, training, and hard work worth it.

  The doorbell rang.

  The doorbell wasn’t supposed to ring. Cableguy wasn’t supposed to show up.

  She went to the door, stood on bare tiptoes, and peered through the peephole. It might, after all, have been a random attacker. Sometimes, especially if dignitaries were on-site, Admin might budget in a little extra realism.

  It was Cableguy. He had the truck. He had the uniform. She didn’t recognize the researcher playing him—a newbie.

  Last thing she needed was a newbie to mess up the historical accuracy of her H&H shift. At least he had the hat and toolbox. He was, all-in-all, a great Cableguy: tall and lean; dark, short hair. His sharp jaw-line worked on chewing gum, and practiced glances at his watch and side-to-side made him look impatient.

  He rang the doorbell again.

  She opened the door.

  “Sweet meet,” he said. “Cableguy.”

  She caught the name on his uniform tag. “Aaron.” She almost broke character. She
almost told him to go away, to get out of the dome and the preserve before he got arrested. Almost, but not quite. Breaking character would only draw criticism no matter how screwy things got. Criticism meant more training, less research, less time alone in her hard suit, less time pacing—less time to herself. Someone might be watching. No matter what, she had to look good, look her period LA part.

  She flipped her hair, giggled, and said, “Come in. The sets are over there.” She gestured to her requisite five TV sets—one for each room of the house. They sat in a row on an altar at the far end of her tile-and-plush living room. At the end of the row, they even had a palm-sized, waterproof watchman for the bathroom. In addition to room support, each set represented one of the five major uses: gaming, webbing, dissemination of dissatisfaction, news obsession, and babysitting.

  The watchman ran a constant loop of Mouse illusions.

  “What’s the problem, ma’am?” he asked.

  “Two hundred and fifty-six channels and nothing on.” At least he knew the Cableguy script. He might even make her look good.

  “I’ll see what I can do.” He headed to the sets. Tools settled on the carpet, he pulled his pants down far enough to show his butt crack, then he bent and fiddled with the sets.

  She began to think maybe Aaron was a professional, an actual historian. He seemed to know what he was doing.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” she asked.

  “Bottled water would be nice.” He stayed focused on the sets. “Universal remote?”

  “Yeah-huh.” She went to the kitchen for a bottle of water. When she came back, he acted like he had fixed the cable feeds. The sets flickered, each with their own representation of life in LA.

  She handed him the water.

  He smiled.

  Fingers touched. He was definitely on script.

  During their sex scene, she got her lips up to his ear. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You can get recycled for this.”