Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  Now, upon confirmation, the girl ached for her twin, and she thought to herself, maybe she would have been able to fix her. She could learn how to do it. She could study. Those around her marveled at the ease with which she learned. She could read before she could talk. She could imagine as easily as she could remember. And it was easy for her to imagine her mother. All she had to do was look in the mirror and guess which parts came from her. She wanted to amputate these things, but she was no fool. She knew that before she cut herself apart, she had to learn how. And it was hard. She was always alone. She had no friends her age in her small, cold tourist town beneath the mountain. And even the adults, both the ones from other places who imagined moving to tropical paradise and the others whose families had lived here for generations and were now relegated to jobs servicing the newcomers, both types whispered behind her back that she was a freak. It was the one thing they could agree upon.

  No one would teach her, so she taught herself. She started with animals—like the true offspring of a scientific giant, lab rats first. She begged her father for two from the same litter. The softhearted man felt badly for the child and bought them for her. When he found them flayed in her bedroom, one eyeless with parts everywhere, he was horrified. Looking back on it now, she thinks he should have been proud. The girl was only four years old, but her hands were steady enough to remove the eyes with such precision.

  He vowed never to buy her a pet again. She didn’t mind. Alone, she enjoyed the challenge of catching life out in the wild. Birds, fish, the occasional vermin. She wished her sister were there trapping these things with her, though. Even if she’d had to be her twin’s caregiver, leading the frail, blind girl by the hand, she would have been able to teach her. To enjoy this with her. Together, they could have learned how to fix her.

  When the father caught the girl clipping the entrails of one of the last remaining dogs on the island, he trembled. Why? he asked. You shouldn’t have let her die, she said, her bloody hands stitching the dog back up. The man said he had no choice. You are no man, the girl said. She hadn’t said this to hurt him. She just believed it to be true. She’d tried furiously to stitch the dog up before its heart stopped beating, but of course, it was always easier to take something apart than to put it together.

  After the canine incident, her father contacted her mother, who was on the East Coast at the time. He couldn’t handle Ascalon anymore, he said. He told her that his business was failing as technology outpaced him and the new gear became too expensive for him to buy. He could no longer maintain the houseboat that he used as his dive shop because no one made the parts he needed any longer. She replied that a friend of hers would pick up the girl and enroll her in boarding school. She reminded the man of his promise. She would take the girl if he kept their secrets. There was no twin. And the child was not hers. She would send him some money. The man agreed, though his daughter did not understand why she had to leave. She was learning for him, trying to show him that she could repair life. That she could cut off the things he hated about her. Once at boarding school, she would hasten the project in order to get back home to him. Then he would love her. But he ended up not loving anything except alcohol, drinking away the money that her mother sent.

  The woman who picked her up claimed to be an aunt named Jerry Caldwell. After her father signed the papers presented to him by the woman, she and the girl left him standing in a puddle of his own tears. During the shuttle run from the island to the continent, the girl cried so hard, she couldn’t breathe. Jerry was patient and kind, but the girl was nonetheless blinded by tears. When they arrived, Jerry brought her clothes, sheets, blankets, and a new identity. The girl was no longer Ascalon Lee. Her new name was Tamamo Nomae. The girl asked what it meant. Jerry said she was named after the Fox with Nine Tails, a very clever woman in Japanese mythology. Tamamo liked the idea, but she never forgot her real name.

  When enrolled in boarding school, the surgical cutting wasn’t as difficult as she imagined. The institution’s tools, like its lessons, were among the best in the world. First came the pinky finger. A laser saw in the lab meant for etching out decorative figurines out of polymer glass. Oops, a finger gone. One girl screamed. Another fainted. The girl still didn’t understand her mother’s horror at her sister’s tail. Amputation was painful, but easy enough.

  Then came the cut down her forehead to her right eye. In her dormitory, with a mirror and scalpel. A steady hand and an exquisite pain that encouraged her to sustain the perfect separation of flesh. On arrival, she had looked into the mirror and hated the tears that ran down her cheeks. She remembered her father, always crying. She hated the eyes that produced these tears, eyes that she knew were her mother’s. She did not know she was going to pluck the eye until she did it. This blindness was what her twin would have felt if she’d survived. And it was awful. But it felt fixable. Just about every organ could be transplanted and cloned for generations now, but eye transplants were close to impossible: too many muscles, vessels, nerves, and most importantly, the eyes weren’t just connected to the brain, they were part of it. An eye transplant was as impossible as transplanting another part of the brain. But perhaps she could create something artificial to replace it. Perhaps this was the first step to recreating the brain itself. Her roommate screamed and screamed after walking into the room. What she didn’t know was that the girl had considered performing this surgery on her the night before, after weeks of being ridiculed by her and her friends. While the roommate had slept, Tamamo’s scalpel had hovered above her forehead, but in the end, she’d decided against it. So really, her roommate should be grateful. The ambulance arrived. Her roommate, traumatized, ended up at a psychiatric hospital and wasn’t allowed to return, even though the girl was. Why had they allowed her back? Akira Kimura had paid them a visit.

  “Accursed creator,” the girl said.

  “Shelley?” her mother said back. She looked the girl over and turned to Jerry Caldwell. “Possibly body integrity identity disorder.”

  The seven-year-old looked up at the mother. “That is neurobiological reductionism.”

  Her mother smirked. “Explain.”

  “My cortical body matrix does not see less. It sees more. There’s something missing that I must replace.”

  Her mother frowned. “That is nonsense.”

  I am just as intelligent as she is, the girl thought. Then she decided to test something. “I’m not only missing my eye. You know what it is, the other thing I miss.”

  “Shut your mouth,” her mother hissed.

  Jerry, visibly taken aback by the mother’s response, began to speak, but the woman interrupted her. “I would like to paint you,” she said to her daughter.

  “Paint me as I will be.”

  “No. I will paint you as you are.”

  Days after the girl met the goddess Akira Kimura and posed for that painting, she asked Jerry for her mother’s academic records. Jerry first said no, but when the girl threatened to carve out another part of herself, Jerry relented, on the condition that there would be no more cutting. The girl received the records and focused her energy on smashing every single one. Over the next four years, she completed all of her elementary, middle, and secondary education at the institution. When Jerry took her out to dinner for graduation, she looked more scared than proud. But she told the girl about her trust fund, banked on a Caribbean island. She mentioned college and begged her to wear a false finger and false eye. The girl replied, “This isn’t my mother’s face or my father’s, it is mine, and I will not be false like them. I will do with it what I please.”

  And so, she threw herself into cybernetic technology. Hate drove her. The kind of hate that only the abandoned can understand. It led her to accomplish more than her mother had, to show her father the magic he had discarded like trash. She knew she’d been a silly little girl back then, but that foundation was the seed of her accomplishment. Her hormones in puberty m
agnified her hate for her parents even more. That hate began to numb into competitive drive, with her mother as her phantom rival. The girl moved from one subject to the next as she mastered each field. After biology, quantum computing technology, and after that, neuroscience. Unlike the rest of the world, multitaskers who settled for knowing a little about everything, she trusted the value of doing only one thing at a time. And each time, she tapped into her hate to motivate herself.

  Meanwhile, her real mother sat there, peering through space-time, searching for a celestial end in the infinite. The girl thought it a foolish thing to study, when one could simply glance into a mirror and see an endless number of things more fascinating, ready to peel off and put under a scope. She became a cybernetic surgeon. She converted an iE into an actual artificial eye and found that having nine tails was nothing compared to a cybernetic one that was linked to her brain. But the iE neurolink was her masterpiece. She engineered and programmed it to crack through firewalls and obtain root access to other systems. She was the first in the history of the world to accomplish these things, but she hoarded this knowledge, which was easy, since she still had no friends. These breakthroughs would have made her twin whole.

  She was about to turn twenty-one and was ready to show her mother how she had surpassed her. Her mother, whom she hadn’t seen since that day by the banyan tree. Her mother had been wrong. She didn’t suffer from BIID or some other affliction. She was simply adding and enhancing. She would make the mother see it for herself if she had to. See that Ascalon Lee would have been able to fix her sister. Akira was back on the island by this time, which surprised the girl. But it was true the best telescopes on earth were there: atop a high mountain in the middle of the ocean, with the only nearby light pollution from island residents who slept soundly at night after catering to tourists. Her father must have been furious with her mother’s return, drinking in an impotent rage. The girl made plans to travel to the island to show her mother. It wasn’t her first trip back. She had offered Jerry Caldwell a skyscraper home security system she had invented herself and left something else there, just in case. But as the girl jetted across the Pacific on this trip, hoping to show her mother, it was her mother who showed her.

  The discovery of Sessho-seki. The world trembled. The girl was onboard when she heard the news, and just as she had as a child, she wept to the point that she couldn’t breathe. She spent the flight in the lavatory, ashamed. She could never surpass her mother. She no longer loved her father, a bitter alcoholic who spent his time taking tourists on deep dives, none deep enough to cleanse him of his dark secret. She only had Jerry, whom, if she was being honest, she didn’t love either. Years ago, the girl had studied her own brain chemistry and noticed there were certain substances she lacked and others she had an abundance of. She could easily have cured herself then, if she’d thought there was something to cure.

  She spent the next few months wallowing while the world wailed, grieving for itself before its death. She spent this time in alleys and basements, participating in the apocalyptic bacchanal and bathing in all the pleasures she’d forsaken her entire life, only to find that they did not give her lasting pleasure. She made money by media blasting the plague anxiety off the brains of the wealthy and frolicking on the Dark Web. She launched several backdoor hacks from there. The impending doom of Sessho-seki seemed to render cybersecurity updates moot.

  Then came the news of Ascalon, the weapon that would save the world. Ascalon! Her name, even if no one else knew. Maybe her mother had loved her after all.

  But she wouldn’t approach Akira just yet. She wanted to learn what her mother had unraveled first, so she could hold an intelligible conversation with her on the mysteries of the universe. She worked under the tutelage of a pure oddity, a brilliant but happy man who, unlike most geniuses, had all the substances in his brain perfectly balanced. He loved to wear silly ties and would later be found hanging from one of them. An impossible suicide. The girl, who had started calling herself Ascalon again, despite all the derisive comments that accompanied the name change, which only added to her drive, had learned something crucial from this man before his passing. He believed that Sessho-seki did not exist. At first, she couldn’t believe it. But then, she began to run calculations. Calculations became algorithms, algorithms became simulations, and simulations became theories. Exhausted after her twenty-two-hour workdays, she crawled into an AMP chamber that her trust fund money procured for her, that she had modified herself. She wanted to sleep, but she wanted to dream imaginatively while sleeping. So the chamber not only showered her with the hibernation-inducing molecules that would shut her body down to the precipice of death, it flooded her with a compound extracted from a tropical tree known to send one on a fantastical mental voyage. She’d experimented with the substance in all those back alleys and basements and found that it was the only thing she missed from that period of her life. Even in sleep, she never stopped thinking about Sessho-seki and the Ascalon Project.

  The first simulation was Sessho-seki. The second was the Ascalon Project. The third, a theoretical model of Akira’s brain. For this, she needed to investigate the personal. To learn and document everything about Akira Kimura. While the world spent its last gasp looking up, Ascalon spent it looking in. She had always been better with a microscope than a telescope. And it was easy learning that started from the lips of the father and ended in books about Akira.

  By this time, the purge was beginning. And she followed and watched with cloaked surveillance technology. She bore witness to the father, now a drunken, buffoonish terrorist, being tricked into the water and reduced to marine snow. The string of scientists, the first of which had been her former mentor—perhaps her first friend, she was never sure—toppled from their lofty towers of understanding by death or shame. She watched this angel of death splash the president’s man and his scientist into the ocean. It was the only time Ascalon was afraid. She thought it foolish of him to risk Akira, but he knew what he was doing. The girl watched that event personally from the shore, the image of the SEAL plummeting as eternal in her mind as paint on a copper canvas. She began to weave a theoretical map of Akira’s brain and used her own corticolimbic system as its base. After all, she inherited it from her mother, as most daughters do. Once she finished the model, she ran the three simulations together. She held Akira Kimura in even higher esteem. The woman was indeed becoming a god.

  That’s when she decided to approach the mother for the first time since childhood. The construction of Ascalon, the great cosmic ray, was fast approaching. It made sense that Ascalon, the girl, reunite with her mother quickly as well.

  Akira Kimura, however, was difficult to get to, not just because of her guard and the endless walls of security, but because her mother did not communicate by iE. She could not be messaged or hacked. But the girl knew where the mother looked daily: through the God’s Eye. So the girl hacked that. And when Akira Kimura sat in front of the telescope, the girl remotely steered its gaze back to her birthplace. The scene of her mother’s original sacrifice and sin. And the mother knew who was sending the message. She was a genius, after all. The mother contacted Jerry Caldwell, and a meeting was set.

  Oh, the blissful excitement that danced inside the girl’s head! She would meet her mother, not as a pathetic, self-harming child, but as a disciple, worth both herself and her twin. They were to meet at the mother’s penthouse, 177 atmospheres under the sea. Akira, Jerry, and Ascalon. No bodyguards. No iEs. It pained the girl, who wanted to show her mother what she’d built. An iE that completely interfaced with the brain. One that could infiltrate other systems. She was very, very close to being able to construct one that could split mind and body. One that could store consciousness and live outside a human shell. The girl stupidly thought it was something her mother could never build. She knew the world wasn’t ending. Perhaps she and her mother could become partners in the new world that rose from the ashes of the old.

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nbsp; She removed the iE and cut her hair so that it would drape over the crater and scar. It was the first time in her life that she cut to beautify instead of replace. She went to the seascraper, giddy, landed, and instructed her iE to wait for her here. Perhaps after she told her mother what she had accomplished, Akira would want to see her great work. It was late, and the lobby was empty. She stepped up to the facial recognition scan. And when it read her as not Tamamo Nomae, but Ascalon Lee, she smiled. Her mother would finally recognize the daughter and introduce her to the world! She would no longer be seen as a monster, but as the offspring of a god. Jupiter’s Minerva, Brahma’s Ganapati, Akira’s Ascalon. And the world would worship the girl as they did her mother.

  Akira and Jerry waited for the girl in the penthouse. Upon exiting the elevator, she first looked at Jerry Caldwell. So pretty. So polished. Born with everything. A natural candidate for friends in every sphere. She hated her in that moment for the privilege and care she had been granted her entire life. Then she turned to the mother, trembled, and involuntarily burst into tears. Before she knew what she was doing, she was clinging to the god-woman’s ankles, sobbing “Mother! Thank you!” over and over again. “Thank you for saving me! For saving all of us!”