Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  Oh, how she groveled. Jerry tried to pull her up, but she refused. Jerry didn’t see what the girl did. Hadn’t dreamed what she’d dreamed. The end of holy wars, cold wars, world wars, and trade wars. Clean waters, clean air, a clean Earth, a clean collective conscience, a place where children could once again play amongst themselves away from the gaze of paranoid parental supervision. Humans living beyond human years, beyond meager standards. The future, wearing down and crushing the pillars of soon forgotten times and places. All from a single thought. Not the binding of a microorganism to a host, but something more powerful, an intangible thought flooding through humanity’s collective mind, passed down from generation to generation. A scar in the sky an eternal reminder of this thought: we are all lucky to be alive.

  Even if it was all a scam.

  Akira pulled the girl up and brushed her hair from her face. Ashamed, Ascalon looked down. The mother gently raised the girl’s chin and inspected the crater, even pulled open the lid to gaze upon its total darkness. And the first words from the mother to the daughter after nearly twenty years were, “Self-mutilation has a long and practical history with young women. Women disfigured themselves to prevent rape. To protect themselves from even their fathers and brothers. The act may even be in our DNA by now.”

  The crying girl nodded, but she did not agree. She wanted to explain to her mother that this was autonomy. When she had done this to her eye, she’d felt her drowned half come back to life. She was that much closer to perfection, and with her mother’s help, she could get there.

  As if reading the girl’s mind, the mother reached into her pocket and pulled out a small orb. An eye! Had she already improved upon what the girl had invented? No, she was far too busy with the Ascalon Project. And the girl had kept her scientific discoveries a secret. The mother stuck the artificial eye in the empty socket. The girl tried to look through it, but saw nothing—it was only glass. “Now let me look at you,” the mother said. The girl feared looking directly at her mother but did what she was told. “You look much more like me than your father,” Akira said flatly.

  And the girl wept again, harder this time. She had finally recognized their kinship! Might there even be love, finally? “I . . . I know,” the girl stuttered. “I know what you’ve done. What you’ve done for all of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The trick. It’s the trick of a god.”

  The mother raised an eyebrow, looked at Jerry, and said, “Could you leave us for a few minutes?”

  Jerry paused, then nodded. She went into another room and closed the door. The mother turned back to the girl. “The trick?”

  “Mother, I know,” the girl said. “There’s no asteroid. No weapon. Just machines that will create a permanent light. A reminder of everything you’ve given.”

  The mother sighed and shook her head. The girl rubbed at her eye. The mother grabbed the girl’s hand, and the girl began to calm. “I did all the calculations,” the girl said. “Ran every possible simulation.”

  “Then you calculated incorrectly.”

  “I know what Idris Eshana did for you. I’ve spent years studying this, mother. Shadowing you. I’ve figured it out. Are you not proud?”

  Her mother certainly didn’t look proud.

  “I see what you see,” the girl said.

  “And what is that?”

  “A better world.”

  The girl was calm now. She began to feel sleepy. Had her body expended too much adrenaline trying to see through the eye earlier? “And you recorded these calculations and simulations? All this supposed evidence?” the mother asked.

  “I recorded everything,” the girl said. “Even the fall into the ocean of the president’s man and his witch. Even Father’s death. You will still be worshipped forever.”

  The mother nodded. “Come with me,” she said. She led the now tired girl to the bedroom, which was empty except for an open AMP chamber. The girl rubbed her eye again, this time out of weariness. She looked at the ocean-facing walls of glass with real sea spiders climbing all over them. Then she understood.

  “The eye,” the girl gasped.

  “Yes, the eye,” said the mother.

  The girl fought the sleepiness. “But I’m trying to help you.”

  The girl imagined the AMP from the eye coursing through her body and became even more tired. “There’s one lesson that your father taught me,” the mother said. “Only one. He grew up on the island and was raised to spear fish in these waters. He taught me how to spear fish. How to hold my breath long enough to kill.”

  The girl gasped, or tried to. She couldn’t tell if she’d managed it. The mother gently lay the girl back into the open chamber. “Don’t worry,” the mother said. “I won’t kill my last living child. But you will sleep.”

  “For how long?” she asked, barely able to formulate the words.

  The mother popped out the girl’s fake eye and inspected it. “Where did you leave your iE?” the mother asked.

  So she didn’t know. If she did, she would have demanded the girl bring it in with her. She just wanted it to cover her tracks.

  “For how long?” she asked again. She activated emergency protocol. The iE received the silent neural transmission and zipped away. Now, Akira frowned at the fake eye. Then she turned to the girl and stared at her empty socket. Something was clicking inside her.

  “Where is it?” the mother asked.

  “I’m sorry, Mother, but you won’t find it.”

  The mother pressed a button to shine a light on the girl’s face; it pierced the empty socket. Her frown slowly transformed into a gasp. She said it before the girl could: “Love the likes scarcely imagined.”

  “Rage the likes of which you would not believe,” her daughter said back.

  “Shelley was too wordy.”

  The mother put the eye back in the girl’s socket. She closed the chamber and pressed a button. It rose to vertical so the girl could see the sheets of glass infested with sea spiders, the ocean deep, dark, and endless behind them. How silly it was of her to think she could surprise a person who was incapable of being surprised. There was no doing something that Akira Kimura didn’t see coming. Akira demanded that she sleep, so she would sleep.

  With realization, there are only two versions. You’re either in time or too late. The girl was too late. Jerry Caldwell stepped into the room and tried to save the girl with savage arguments and fluttering hands. Akira was patient at first, but finally had to invoke the name of her guard. If Jerry persisted, the mother would unleash him on everyone in this room. Including Akira herself.

  And so, the world would end.

  Jerry Caldwell had made her strongest closing argument and lost. She stepped in front of the AMP chamber, took one last teary-eyed look at the girl, and walked out. That was the last time Jerry Caldwell and Akira Kimura would ever be in the same room.

  The mother looked through the glass at the barely conscious girl. She began to hum a pretty tune that made the girl even sleepier. The only thing keeping her awake were the vibrations of anxiety. Then the mother transitioned from a hum to words with the same melody.

  Ascalon is not only the name of the savior

  It’s the name of the daughter

  The one I gave up

  Find her for me and tell her that I’m sorry

  No longer able to move her arms and legs, the girl focused on her tail. It was a part of her, but it wasn’t. There was no blood flowing through it. It wasn’t connected to her metabolism and wouldn’t go into deep sleep like the rest of her. But it was connected to her primary motor cortex through her corticospinal tract, and her primary motor cortex was shutting down. She tried to inch her tail toward the release button inside the chamber, but the tail moved slower than the 30 micrometers per minute that death moved. She didn’t know what to do. She had no desire to sleep, but
it was hopeless. All she had was that final conscious thought. Tail. Release.

  “The world cannot know what you know until I’m gone,” the mother said. “You and I cannot exist at the same time.”

  And the girl, who had thought herself fearless her entire life, only now realized that was a lie. Her greatest fear was being alone. It was why she’d cried so hard when she’d been forced to leave her father. It was why she longed for both her twin and her mother. She had always thought of her solitude as temporary. Something that she had her whole life to fix. But now, she would be trapped in it forever. She had failed. Tail. Release. Tail. Release.

  She slipped into sleep repeating this futile mantra.

  All the girl can remember of the time of her sleep are flashes of light in the otherwise total darkness of the midnight zone. During her hibernation, there were rare instances of torpor, of sleep less deep, during which her tail would lightly twitch. This also allowed her to witness, in the briefest glimpses, the construction of an underwater cityscape. She noticed the fabrics of the different seasons, even in the deep. Sometimes, she believes, she saw her mother standing above her, surgical mask covering everything but her eyes. Scalpel in hand. But these moments were all so brief. Bits and pieces of incomplete thought, some of which floated from the unconscious up to the surface. Comet dust. Stock market crash, stock market rally. Everything in existence moves above absolute zero. A birthday party. A blindfolded girl being spun by her friends. Koku: the amount of rice it takes to feed a person for one year. Blue water, blue people. People of all colors. Those spiders in the glass: how many generations of them have passed? Genetically engineered plants that grab nitrogen from the air. Tail. Release. A tomb. Metal skies and rain like lava. Kinetic energy turned electric. Nuclear disarmament. The game is over. All you can do is decide how you will lose. Human action is predictable. Will is unbreakable because it is more than human. God, frozen and divided. Tail. Release. The zombie galaxy. Expanding Earth theory. Eternalism, not block universe. Wisdom only comes from personal pain, just like insanity. Sessho-seki smashing into Earth again and again and again.

  The girl spent nearly thirty years alone in this waking dream.

  But this didn’t matter, she later forced herself to believe. She embraced her mother’s notion of time, without its linear qualities. We had transformed, becoming the pinnacle of human civilization. Knowing what everything was while forgetting how any of it worked.

  Then, after thirty years, the tail finally hit its mark. She freed herself. She could not walk or see. She was birthed from the chamber just as vulnerable and broken as her twin decades before. All she knew was, she couldn’t stay here. Her mother would find her and put her back inside. Or maybe strangle and drown her, like she did the sister. There was no one to welcome her back. No one to delight in the news that she’d escaped.

  There were only those who would regret it.

  She struggled to remove the poisonous eye, the only thing the mother had ever given her. A trick, like the one she’d unleashed upon the world. The girl placed the eye on the floor. It did not roll. The penthouse foundation was perfectly level. Then, with her tail, the girl impaled the eye on that foundation. It broke to pieces.

  The girl crawled to the wall and guided herself to the lift. She would need her eye. And it wasn’t far. It was at Jerry Caldwell’s, hidden in the heart of her holo art. The girl’s body was weak, except for the tail. She used it to force herself upright. The tail, which she had always seen as her sister’s, had saved her. She stumbled into a heli-taxi and made it to Jerry’s. Having built the security system, she easily bypassed it. She retrieved her eye and made it out undetected, finally able to see again.

  For the first year, like a sufferer of Cotard’s syndrome, she truly believed she was dead. She began to build her own tomb beneath the lava. The islanders, recent transplants who spent their iE-free days cleaning and composting and their nights on natural hallucinogens, finally found her digging in the deserted obsidian fields. In awe of her mechanical eye and her powerful tail that broke through rock, they began to help her. Even from the beginning of construction, it became apparent to her. She was building her mother’s tomb, not her own. She wasn’t the one approaching death; she hadn’t earned it.

  When the tomb was done, she headed toward the waterfall where she and her sister were born. The little grave was right where her father had drunkenly told her it had been. He’d buried the body at the beginning of the ancient trail, away from the water so the remains wouldn’t be washed away. The girl dug up and collected the bones in a tiny coffin, then made one of her own, sleeping alongside her sister. She really did feel like she was already dead after decades in that chamber. But over time, she finally began to wake up. She felt less lonely lying next to the twin.

  Making a child feel less alone. That was a mother’s job.

  So began Ascalon’s mission.

  She reached out to Jerry Caldwell and regained her trust. Then she began to work. To strengthen her body. She resumed her studies as well. On the birds who came to sit on the black rocks above. On dissection. Neuroscience. She dyed her skin blue and hair pink so no one would recognize her when she ventured out, although it had been thirty years and that was unlikely. She studied the mannerisms of teen boys and managed to pass as one. A temporary disguise. Then she began to watch her mother. At first nervously and at a distance, but Akira didn’t appear to be searching for her. Didn’t appear to worry in the slightest. This made the girl even angrier. Her mother didn’t care. She didn’t even change the security protocol of her penthouse. She just continued to stare out at the stars every night, as if everything else around her was too predictable and mundane to merit her gaze. Furious, the girl turned her attention to the guard. What a sad, silly existence. She may have been trapped in an AMP chamber for three decades, but she hadn’t built her own prison. He had built his several times over. A parade of wives and children. A tedious, unprofitable occupation. Spiraling debt. Ha! She could see his eyes constantly wandering. Maybe to decades ago, when he’d been relevant. Maybe to greens and reds, which she knows from his medical records he cannot see. But slowly, over months of observation, she realized there was more to his colorblindness. She collected DNA samples, which was easy enough. Human beings shed DNA wherever they go. The DNA she acquired was from nose hair clippings left in a sink. She studied him on a genetic level and found something fascinating. A mutation. Mutations are common enough, but this one was extremely rare. An unusually high number of olfactory sensory neuron receptors. And a synesthete. He saw what he smelled. And that was murder, wasn’t it? Was it an accidental enhancement? Possibly. He had grown up in the brief age of legal genetic enhancement, and such an enhancement could only occur pre-birth. Unfortunate that she could not recreate this enhancement for herself.

  But he could be a potential ally. An easy one to acquire. Someone itching to become relevant again. Given his special sense, he would be easy to put on the trail. Like the girl, he is a slave, not only to his gifts, but to taste as well. The taste of fresh blood. It has been a long time, and right now, he is starving.

  I will ask him when the time is right.

  It has been said that matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move. I am space. Black, encompassing, alone. And now I must carve my mother into a god.

  22

  When anyone is out on the docks with Ascalon, Sabrina demands that they hold her hand the entire time. The next morning, Ascalon and I are out for a walk, and I’m holding her hand, which she does not like. I think about the differences between her and John and my first daughter, Brianne, though I don’t remember much about her. Brianne was a constant fountain of head-banging temper tantrums, which probably made it easier for me to go off to war. As for John, he was a scared, clingy baby who only had to be told “careful” or “no” once, and I think about how, in the end, this obedience and fear didn’t keep him alive. I look down a
t Ascalon, who is leaning over the edge trying to escape my grasp. If I let go, she will plunge straight into the water. I sigh. It’s still a sore spot that that psycho laughed at my existence in her book. A sore spot that my parents may have tried to soup up my genetic code, mucked it up, and never even told me. Sabrina, she’s still at home spinning from the idea that Sessho-seki, the cause of global calamity—of her parents’ suicide—may not have existed. She was so young then, just a kid, but she remembers the panic. Her parents’ obsession and the neglect that followed. I don’t believe Ascalon Lee. I was there. It was real. When I told Sabrina this, she asked if I ever saw it. I admitted I didn’t. Her frown in response was almost enough to make me doubt my judgment.

  I glance at my new, drone-delivered iE then scoop up Ascalon, hug her, and kiss her cheek. She doesn’t care for that much either. She says, “Crawl, crawl!” which means she wants to walk. John loved to be carried. These children are so different, or maybe I’m remembering John wrong. As for Brianne, I never even knew her as a toddler.

  I wonder how Akira remembered her own daughters. I don’t understand how she did what she did to both of them. I put Ascalon down, and she bolts. From behind, she looks like a tiny orangutan running. Teetering side to side while speeding forward, long arms dangling freely. I catch up to her and grab her hand. She accepts it this time. I have no idea what’s changed.

  The docks yawn with morning activity. The vac tube train breaches the surface. A few early birds in battered work attire step inside the tube, and the train is sucked down underwater and follows a path that resembles old indoor plumbing. A couple of heli-taxi pilots sip piping hot coffee out of dense foam-fit thermoses, waiting for their first fares. It always struck me as funny that we drink out of the same stuff we wear. I guess it makes sense. It keeps the coffee hot but can also ice it for the cold-brew folks. A couple, at least a hundred years old, sit on a bench, looking up at Ascalon’s Scar. They are old enough to remember. A group of red teens on their way to school walk toward us, whispering and giggling in each other’s ears. A couple off to the side, VR while walking. These games nowadays. You can turn a stroll to school into high adventure. Isn’t reality strange enough? I wanna unplug them. I squint to block some of that red my new eyes are still adjusting to. I look at their wrists. All of them are wearing identical beaded bracelets. The beads are as clear as water, one on each bracelet etched with katakana characters in gold. They stop to admire Ascalon.