by E. L. Aldryc
My Friend, the Gifted
E. L. Aldryc
© E. L. Aldryc 2020. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Formatted by Drew Avera www.drewavera.com/book-formatting
Contents
A Cold Welcome
Belo Horizonte
Star Quality Alignment
Rebelo Horizonte
The Infinite Lightness of Testing Tuesday
The Art of Clarinet Improvisation
Ah, Yes, the Dive
The Jolly Aftermath of Being Seen
Did You Hear about the New Paragnost?
You Had Me at “Augmentation”
Off With You, Be on Your Way
2363: Odyssey
The Turning of the Eye
To Love is to Negotiate
The Wall-Pounding Sound of Reunion
Remote Control
The Hopefuls
Of All the Homes in Madilune
From Techno Tapas to Techno Pancakes
When You Go Full Circle and End Up in a Spiral
So Long and Thanks for All the Glam
Aftermathematics
Flock to Your Poison
It’s a New World, Baby
The (Un)fortunate Seer
A Short Ode to Failure and its Derivatives
Walk Without Rhythm
And You Want Three Wishes
Mirror
Round Two, but Only for the Brave
Items of Desire
Backwards and Onwards
The True Culling
The Turning of the Stars
My Other Friend
A Friendly Note From the Publisher
To Billy Pilgrim.
Please return my calls.
A Cold Welcome
“The Five Philosophers took knowledge that led nowhere and replaced it with something the world needed—a plan to enrich plain science with the sublime. Responsibly.
Only three of the original Five left us with lasting legacies, but our world has changed beyond recognition. We practice true alchemy. We live with conscious AI. And we celebrate the gifted, who see a future where the work of the Five converges into something beautiful and better.
They call it the Universe of Infinite Wonder.
See it with them. It is the only plan for a future worth living, one where the magical invades the ordinary just enough to establish a precise new balance. See it. Many forms of suffering will disappear for the final time. And we will be free to challenge the self, not the hunger, for the first time. Humanity deserves mercy.
But you’ll be wise to know one thing. No matter how many legacies are left, there is only one guiding light and shepherd of a future for humanity.
The Gifted.
The Gifted are the key to everything.”
Augustina Weiss, Rising Dawn President in Rotation, Opening Keynote for Faraji-con 2351
Belo Horizonte
Saturday, 1 December 2362
Elodie hit rock bottom on a Tuesday night. It happened at 4 a.m. in Brasil, in a poolside dive in Belo Horizonte, right after sixteen hours of damage control. The gifted had moved the doomsday clock a whole five minutes closer to midnight; there was an environmental disaster detected on the event horizon, something about clean water disappearing again. They drafted all departments to come up with emergency patents, and no one got leave until the gifted decided they had enough in their arsenal to weather a potential crisis. Elodie was noticing how they increased in frequency. Junior researchers didn’t get breaks on days like these. All they had were the parties afterwards, raging with a force of four hundred thirsty, overworked brains.
Outside, everyone still tried to dance by the pool, but it was getting harder. The sticky floor had spilled drinks all over, together with other less glamorous fluids. No more pictures. Through the small window in the toilet, Elodie heard someone shouting that they’d lost their handbag. The water was still; the handbag was floating in the middle of it. A loud, warped pachanga kept playing for the few who still kept up with the beat. Inside the villa, Elodie held her best friend’s hair as she vomited her way through a bottle too many, swaying back and forth. And there came this moment of clarity.
She messed up. Two years at the Sight Institute, and all she did was hold hair back for the elite. The rest fell under Soraya’s job description. Her friend. Their boss’s right hand. An indispensable asset. The one that made it. And Elodie? Harmless. Great at parties. Invisible at work. She’d never seen herself with this much lucidity.
“I have to be back at work in four hours,” Soraya declared, her voice all raspy. Elodie listened to the music. It wasted a heavenly harmony on these drunks. But Elodie was listening. She heard the words in the music.
No hay que ver el futuro para saber lo que va a pasar.
And it was never as simple as in that moment. A peripheral idea, the test was actually her last option. Why couldn’t she acknowledge it?
“Listen, I want to do it. I’m going to test for giftedness,” she said.
“What?” Soraya paused at the statement and raised her head with great strain. “We’ve talked about this. No, you don’t. Just no. The gifted are… disgusting.”
And she twisted in nausea, returning to the toilet. Elodie gathered her white hair and held it up like a good friend.
“Don’t be like that, not when I’m telling you I just want to try something,” Elodie said and tapped Soraya’s back as she coughed. “I’ve been here for what, two years? I haven’t done anything. I’m the lowest-rated researcher there is. This is your fault, too. You don’t push me hard enough.”
“You’re not the lowest.”
“That’s not the point! Where’s my exceptional?”
“Now you listen,” Soraya said from below, somewhat delirious, “I want to stop having this conversation every time you’re wasted. You have nothing to prove. You’re not damaged. People come to you to talk about things other than work. That’s the gift. You’re great. Being taken seriously would destroy you.”
Even in this deplorable state, Soraya was all eloquence. Elodie pulled her hair up a bit too tightly and twisted it to get it away from her face. That’s what she got for being all condescending.
“Oh, please. You don’t have to be messed up to accomplish something extraordinary,” she replied. “I also work for the Sight Institute, so I should contribute to human progress. Which I am not. And I would like to.”
Soraya had something to add to that, but she groaned in absent pain instead.
Elodie opened up a small mirror window and checked if her lipstick was in place. It wasn’t.
“If I join the gifted, Seravina will take me more seriously. It shows commitment.”
Seravina Giovanotti cultivated and grew the knowledge of the Five. She brought their near-forgotten philosophies back to the forefront of science. She put her money behind what she believed in. That was the woman Elodie wanted to be. When she interviewed Elodie among the dozens of young ambitious students, she said that Elodie had a spark in her. That she could see her thrive. Fast forward, and two years had passed in a flurry of irresponsible drinking and long shifts. Elodie was drained. And ashamed to pass Seravina in the hallway.
“You don’t want her to take you seriously, trust me,” Soraya said weakly in between the convulsions. “I need to be at work in f
our hours. There’s a… correlation.”
“No, that’s on you for being a workaholic. Relax. I’ll just take the test. I’ll be gifted. And I don’t have to be the most gifted person ever. Just a little bit. Just enough to finally have an advantage,” she said, testing out a smile in the mirror app.
“I love how you’re taking this so lightly,” Soraya said and promptly collapsed on the floor and into a foetal position.
“Hey, say you’ll support me!” Elodie closed the window and lay next to her, poking her to see if she was awake. The floor was pleasantly warm, and there was something to look forward to. Even better. All it took was sixteen hours of torture and a revelation.
Soon. The gifted always looked like they were on a mission. Mysterious and heroic. She should have thought of this earlier. The gifted with their gifts. Finally something of direct use to the Institute. She should have gotten tested ages ago. Wonderful and powerful. Not like the current Elodie, who aimlessly drifted from project to project. The Elodie today, who had to manually count thousands of samples because the AI couldn’t see them. Or the Elodie of tomorrow, who might bring coffee to a real researcher. The Elodie after the test—now we’re talking.
“You know I need this,” she whispered.
“No, you don’t,” Soraya whispered back, “and you don’t know the dangers.”
“Okay, but I’m gonna do it anyway,” Elodie whispered. Soraya let out a sigh.
“Stop talking like you mean it.”
The two rarely disagreed on anything. Their friendship was harmony. The gifted were one of the few things that always got Soraya rattled. She didn’t trust them. For no reason, Elodie liked to add.
Someone was banging on the cubicle door. They started shouting in Portuguese, and Elodie kicked back at the door, missing it.
“I hate the gifted,” Soraya mumbled, falling asleep.
“Aha, but once I’m in, you’ll love at least one of them. The statement will no longer be true.” Elodie brushed hair from her face.
Soraya forced herself up. A cute comment, Elodie thought, but it agitated her so much she looked almost sober.
“You are so precious.” Soraya held Elodie’s face in her hands, and it hurt a little. “The gifted don’t care about that. They make people into functions. What if they make you like them, boring and heartless? Or worse. That would kill me, Elodie. It would actually kill me.”
Her eyes were pitch black. You couldn’t tell where her irises ended, so Soraya always looked on edge. But this was real. Her voice was shaking. Elodie pulled her closer and hugged her.
“Zero chance. You come first. I just want to try it. Just to try it,” she said.
“I don’t know how I’m gonna handle this,” Soraya whispered and held on to her even tighter.
This was as much an approval as she would get, and Elodie hoped she wasn’t too drunk to remember getting the green light from the only person who mattered. The stars were aligning.
She turned on her back, observing the grey ceiling, listening to the melody of the music and of kicks to the door.
The Universe of Infinite Wonder was coming for Elodie.
Star Quality Alignment
Tuesday, 1 January 2363
The Sight Institute was a place people were afraid of. It had been a hundred years since the Five shook up the world with their thought. It was a feeble dream, and most of the world was trying to forget these kinds of slim chances, but the Sight Institute didn’t let them. It fed on a legacy. It thrived. A fortress of philosophy in practice. A fortress of the only future worth living. Just saying the name was an act of belief. The Sight Institute. For Elodie, it was like hissing at a weak opponent. The accent helped. “Where do you work?”
“I work at the Sight Institute.”
The way people looked at her when she said it rekindled the wonder she had when she started, if only for a moment. Since the party in Belo Horizonte, Elodie didn’t need people asking where she worked to feel it again. Every night, in the middle of a long routine that let her reflect on the day and get in the right headspace, she tried it on for size. She would say to the mirror, from different angles, and in different, calm voices. “I work in the Sight Institute, but more specifically, Rising Dawn.”
There was never a good time to go through with it, but the weeks immediately after that party were too grim for her to push and add tension in the house. Elodie and Soraya had lived together since she came to the Institute and got paired with a live-in buddy and a temporary flat, all to help her adjust to life on Madilune. Most people moved out after a few months, but Elodie stayed. They clicked. Even though she did most of the talking at the beginning, Elodie learned to watch out for body language and listen carefully. It was the only way to get Soraya to share what was going well, or not so much. Otherwise, she only talked about the Institute.
They used to have a few more close friends until Soraya got into a fight with one of them that was so bad, the poor guy left the island. Things got awkward with the rest. People took sides. The group fell apart. And now, Soraya was avoiding all social life, staying late inside the Particle Lab or studying academic articles at home. And even though it was bad, this too seemed to help the plan along.
Now Elodie spent more time alone in the Institute. And when Soraya wasn’t walking the halls by her side, complaining about legal compliance or something equally boring, an unexpected ally appeared. Tammy Two Feathers, the reigning president of Rising Dawn and one of the most powerful gifted in the world, would give her a little wink and a smile when she passed her, and greet her by name. Prognosts could read intent and translate it into visions of what someone’s future would look like if they followed through. She knew. Elodie’s heart jumped every time. She smiled back.
All these were signs that things were in motion. She just needed to wait for the right moment. Soraya might have known about her intentions, but it was a bad time to test the strength of their friendship.
So on New Year’s Eve, Elodie staged a near-intervention, getting Soraya out of the house to a party off Madilune. She reluctantly agreed, only by Elodie promising that she’d go to the morning meeting with her. Seravina had some kind of news to share with an inner circle, but Elodie was good with secrets, and she often got invited alongside her more influential flatmate. It was both a perk of living with the Institute’s unofficial right hand and a frequent reminder that it wasn’t her brilliance that got her in. Seravina liked certain types of people, and she liked Elodie for the wrong reasons. She kept saying that she had the kind of face that wanted people to see at the Institute. Extroverted. Carefree. Smiling. An image ambassador. People liked to think the Institute was made up of Belgian blondes whose name everyone knew, but no one knew what they were doing there.
At 8 a.m. sharp, New Year’s Day, like torture, Seravina Giovanotti entered the main conference room in the admin building in an orange sequin dress. She was an exceptionally tall, dark woman, with an ever-present shine about her. Elodie never understood whether it was charisma alone or holographic projections that crafted it, only the fact that it made her look like down-to-earth royalty.
The outfit was a parody of the glitz that still rang in Elodie’s ears as she struggled to keep her eyes open. But she had to. She had put purple lipstick on. The thought of its velvety beauty kept her awake, and the sobering nausea was abating. All high-level executives from different departments were in the room, with ten trustworthy junior researchers who acted as assistants to others. At the head of the table were Tammy Two Feathers, and next to Seravina, Soraya. Musing pleasantly. No one could have suspected that forty minutes ago they were both shouting into an ancient karaoke machine in Oslo. Good times.
There was nobody in the room to represent AI interests. People didn’t publicly align with the agenda too tightly—AIs were a dead pursuit ever since their spiritual leader died, and a non-fashionable subject.
And then there was His Excellency Dr Per Birkelund, the only living (and sane) remainder of the F
ive Philosophers. An aura of aggressive self-importance surrounded him, carrying more emotion than his stony face. His last remaining apprentice looked as miserable as ever. Business as usual. Alchemists rarely came to meetings. They considered themselves better than the rest. Their science was the only of the Five that had fulfilled its mission by producing matter that was all sublime and made other matter forget its properties. From their perspective, they were just waiting for the rest to catch up.
Elodie was waiting to see if the apprentice would break the silence. His name was Frederich Hawken, and even while they were friends, he was a tricky one to get through. Now it was awkward. Soraya was uncomfortable, but only Elodie could notice. Frederich was ignoring both, like the absolute ass that he was, probably overthinking an alchemical equation. Elodie used to be intrigued by this indifference. Used to be. This too was a sign it was time to move on to something new.
Seravina gave them reading material as they settled. She and Tammy both stood up in a hurried conversation. One by one, the staff around the table was bringing up visible holographic windows projected in front of them. Madilunian comms were based on their homemade nanotechnology, the tola network—the greatest export in the world. Simple surface thoughts, controlling holographic windows so crisp, you wanted to press your nose against them. Only in Madilune could you see technology close to perfection and the sublime they strived towards.
