by Lily Markova
To Vera and Alex,
on whose couches and in whose bathtubs I slept to recharge my lungeyeart,
and who, when I had been cut off from my kind’s collective consciousness, taught me that
while blood is thicker than water,
water is a lot nicer to swim in.
Contents
00000 (Prologue)
Chapter 00001
Chapter 00010
Chapter 00011
Chapter 00100
00000 (Prologue)
As we were falling to the wet boardwalk, we thought about people. About their eyes.
Have you ever looked yourself in the eye? No, have you ever properly looked into your own eyes? Have you ever stood there, nose to nose with your image reflected in a mirror, peering into its pupils, those micro black holes, deep tunnels, wondering what’s at the bottom? What’s lurking behind that absolutely dark matter letting no light in, letting no light out so that others cannot figure it out, distracted by the fanciful patterns of the irises? But sometimes, when the room is lit dimly, when you’re all alone—have you noticed it yet?
Have you noticed it staring back at you out of the shadowy depths of yourself? Something that makes you twitch and suddenly feel creepy all over when you look just a little more intently, just a little longer than usual? Something strange. Something alien.
You are starting to recognize yourself.
People. Five billion magnificent, beautiful ordinary people. Pulling down their puffy lower eyelids in front of their mirrored bathroom cabinets in the mornings. Briefly checking their makeup when passing by a shop window on their way to work. Furtively grimacing at their distorted reflection in a teaspoon when a lunch conversation becomes too boring. Wearily scrutinizing the dark circles under their eyes in the glass doors of a subway car on their way back home. Never properly looking right into their eyes. They have learned to avoid meeting their own direct gaze, because they sense they might see something that will send a chill down their veins.
Right. You must be still dwelling on the “five billion” part. “What happened to the rest of us?” you may wonder. “What happened to the other two billion human beings?”
There are, indeed, two more billion human beings—only they are not ordinary people. They have recognized themselves. . .or are on the verge of doing so.
The human genus. Human species. Hundreds of human subspecies, ordinary people being one of the two most ancient of them. People have been evolving, unhurriedly, naturally, securely, generation after generation, adjusting to the ever-changing environment. They are, every skin tone and eye shape, exactly the way human beings are supposed to be at this moment of the planet’s unceasing dance.
We love people more than any other human subspecies, but sometimes they just aren’t enough.
Sometimes, the planet throws tantrums. It strives to shake us off, bury us under the oceans. Sometimes, the Sun plots to turn us into fascinating ice sculptures frozen with our terrified faces, with our motionless running legs and our air-grasping hands. Sometimes, the Sun longs to hug us until we’re ashes. And sometimes—most of the times—brilliant, curious people do silly, wicked things. They craft bombs, they poison their water and air, they play with technology that’s growing too smart to be controlled—so smart that a couple of years from now, websites might demand that you prove you’re not a human.
Humankind must survive.
And that is why people have us. Another human subspecies, as ancient as people, indistinguishable from them, slinking after them on tiptoe to have their back when the time comes.
We are the ultimate Plan B.
We are walking storages carrying Human Genome: the Complete Edition within us, all the possible things humans could ever be. We are your Emergency Express Evolution.
We guess that that is what people would call us if they knew about us. They like to give things loud labels. We, however, don’t have our own name for our subspecies. We don’t have our own names for anything. Though we speak—when necessary—every human language that has ever existed, they are not enough to convey all that we see and feel. We don’t need words; we share one mind, a mind vast like the Universe, dark and bright like the Universe too, where ideas and stories and melodies drift and shine like vibrant galaxies.
You have seen us—though, of course, have never properly noticed. We are that passenger on a crowded bus next to whom there’s always an empty seat. We are that friend-of-your-friend who never seems to have a job or a hobby. We are that traveler who sleeps under the constellations and claims that home is everywhere. We don’t have our own life; we only have our mission. We look calm, confident, and aloof. In our eyes, there’s superior peace, almost evil self-sufficiency. We are here to observe.
Sometimes, we use paper and ink to show people the stories we saw—and this one is special.
Chapter 00001
This story began at around six a.m. on the last day of summer. The day promised to be fine, but here around the pier, which was busy despite the early hour, the air was still damp and chilly.
A young man in his late twenties stood leaning his back against the wet iron railing and squinted through the fog; it wasn’t so thick as to prevent him from seeing but was dense enough to tinge everything with bluish gray. People materialized fully ten yards away, passed him, and thirty steps later, dissolved into vague shadows again.
The young man didn’t have a name—at least, not one that he remembered. Instead, he had a gripping sensation at the nape of his neck, just above the seventh vertebra. Having never known any different, he found the sensation reassuring and agreeable—as if it were the gripping of a knot holding him tied to his family, invisible cords running from it to every one of his kind, all their feelings and knowledge tirelessly streaming through those wires.
In spite of the ocean’s cool breath that was tickling the back of his neck, he felt warm, protected, and peaceful. That was mostly because in the center of his chest, there was a well-functioning organ that ordinary people, were their medical equipment able to detect it, would probably call something like “lungeyeart.” Lung-eye-heart. That would make plenty of sense, since the organ was shaped like a third (middle) lung, served as a second, energy heart pumping power to his cells, and determined the way he—for want of a better word—saw the world. It was another sense, a different way of perceiving, which, so far, was beyond people’s comprehension. It felt like seeing the whole world at once without even looking, like embracing it, touching it with his heart, letting it into his chest. He hadn’t engaged in a conversation for almost a week, so his lungeyeart was full.
Although so remarkable on the inside, on the outside the young man was nothing unusual: shoulder-length dark brown hair, straight and tucked behind his slightly pointed ears; thin (not unhealthily or exhaustedly thin, just thin) triangular face; narrow mouth, as if designed for little talking; and attentive, bright eyes. A rather typical big-city dweller (his anonymity-appreciating kind preferred to hide in crowded cities because those were the loneliest places on Earth), casually dressed (jeans and a dark blue sweater with a light-blue collared shirt underneath) and with a look of grave concentration on his face that was his kind’s courteous way of warning people off.
That didn’t always work, of course, so when a street vendor slowed down as she was passing the young man, and pointed her chin inquiringly at the clattering cart full of snacks and drinks she was pushing in front of her, the young man had to put in extra effort. He shook his head and replied, “No, we’re fine, thanks.” The vendor shot him a suspicious look and rattled away. The young man frowned a little, inwardly telling himself off for the incorrect pronoun choice.
It was only when the bluish haze had absorbed the wom
an’s figure that he noticed a glass bottle of lemonade rolling back and forth across the wooden planks under its own momentum—right in front of him, just a few steps away. It must have fallen out of the vendor’s cart. The young man glanced in the direction where she had disappeared, but could no longer find her among the faceless human silhouettes or hear the noise produced by the cart amidst the distant cloud of muted voices and purring of the engines. Not that he would have called after her, anyway. He was not supposed to interfere.
“Somebody might stumble on it and knock their teeth out,” he thought with fleeting sadness. And sure enough, a blonde man in a Hawaiian shirt soon tripped over the bottle, kicking it even closer to the young man. Having avoided sprawling flat on the pier only thanks to the support of the massive suitcase he was dragging behind him, the man cursed and continued to walk, the rubber soles of his beach sandals slapping the wood a bit more resentfully than before.
The bottle rotated one last time and froze, caught in a crack between two planks, parallel to them. The young man looked to the left, to where its neck was pointing, and there, in the distance, he could discern a teenage boy moving toward him. He turned his head to the right, and there was a girl nervously shifting from one foot to another as she peered through the fog. The young man always instinctively knew where to look, and amongst everyone else on the pier, it was important, he felt, that he keep an eye on these two.
She saw him first. With a little shriek of glee, Joy Ramonnes dashed toward Julius Artin, maneuvering among the passengers hurrying in the opposite direction. In that instant, Joy was a wild mess of flying blurs: a spinning wheel of orange high-top sneakers, a bouncing knee-length purple tutu skirt, and a swaying cloud of light-brown wavy hair.
Julius walked steadily, stretching the sleeves of his gray hoodie over his fists, yawning, and hunching his shoulders against the misty morning. He met her a little less than halfway along the pier, and she threw herself around him, miraculously not breaking a hole through his chest as she crashed right into it. Julius waited patiently for Joy to get enough of squeezing him, his arms pressed tightly against his sides, his sleepy face arranged into its usual polite expression.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” said Joy, out of breath.
“Then why were you waiting?” His voice had a slight metallic ring to it, as if it had been passed through a special electronic device.
Joy lowered her eyes and laughed. For a few moments, Julius searched her face, perplexed, as though struggling to interpret the girl’s reaction, and then he added quickly in the mechanical tone of a schoolboy reciting his lesson before a demanding teacher, “I figured you’d want me to be here. It must be important to you.”
She raised her excited gaze back to him, nodding approvingly and suppressing a smile with an air of mock importance. “Good. Very good! Your people skills are improving at an unprecedented rate. I’m impressed.”
“Plus, seven months, right?” said Julius, relieved that Joy had appreciated his attempt to please her. He indicated a dark bulk of something that seemed, behind the smoke-like veil, to be shaped like a mountain brooding over them. The mountain trumpeted in response, signaling its imminent departure. “Seven months. India. Anything could happen. A shipwreck. Exotic diseases. . . .” Julius puffed out his cheeks, apparently making an effort to come up with still more terrifying dangers, and finally released the air from his mouth along with, “Hmm-monkeys? I thought I should say good-bye to you, just in case.”
“R-right. Great,” said Joy, trying to still sound enthusiastic. “Monkeys.”
The ship honked again, and she winced at the loudness of it.
“You’d better get going,” Julius said. “Your old hippies aboard already?”
“Yeah.” Joy shrugged, turning to look at the last couple of shadows rushing up the gangway. She pulled her phone from her jacket pocket and checked the time. “I’ve still got five minutes.”
Julius shook his head. “Come on. You’re going to be late again, like the last time, when you missed that flight. Your folks will. . .” He hesitated, rolling his eyes up, as if monitoring the sky for a suitable expression. “They will freak out.”
“Who, my parents?” She snorted and gave a dismissive grimace. “They’ll be running around the deck, laughing and yelling, ‘Kevin! Kevin McCallister!’, like in Home Alone. Besides, they never freak out, do they? We’re the keep-calm-and-the-kids-are-all-right kind of family.”
“Fine, then I’ll go. You’re not going to loiter here alone, are you?”
“No, please, Jules. Just two more minutes.” She clasped his wrist, pleading. He frowned but nodded.
Joy let go of his sleeve, raised her arms over her head, and spun around several times, her hair and skirt flying out again and then wrapping around her as she stopped.
“So, what do you think, Jules—am I well-prepared for the journey? How do I look?”
To the young man, who safely watched the farewell scene from a dozen yards away, where their weaker eyesight couldn’t reach him, Joy Ramonnes looked perfectly ordinary. Or should he say, “ordinarily perfect”?
“Your height is five feet six point three inches,” said Julius, clearly happy to be of help. His eyes narrowed, their pupils flicking from side to side, gradually scanning Joy’s forehead and sliding down her face, as though he were reading the lines of an invisible book. He didn’t look perfect to the observing young man, by the way—largely because he was nothing ordinary. “Your skin tone is primarily F-F-D-E-A-D, ‘Navajo White,’ that is,” Julius went on, “and your hair color varies from C-D-8-5-3-F, ‘Peru,’ to—”
“O-okay, nerdy boy,” said Joy, “what’s the code for ‘Amethyst’?”
“Well, I believe it’s 9-9-6-6-C-C, but—” he answered, blinking.
“Well, I’m going to have to strangle you until you’re 9-9-6-6-C-C in the face if you don’t tell me right now how I look, using words a decent human being would use.”
“You have medium-slate-bl—I mean, your eyes are blue, just blue,” he corrected himself, having met her stare, which screamed, “Honestly?”
“And how am I supposed to leave you after this? Jules, you can’t go around peeving people off all on your own! That’s a simple question. You don’t really need to describe the person. Most of us are aware that we have hair and legs and everything. Why won’t you just reply, ‘You look nice’?”
“There’s no code for ‘nice,’ Joy, sorry,” said Julius.
“But”—Joy buried her face in her hands to express her helplessness and peeked at him through the gaps between her index and middle fingers—“are you seriously saying that you can’t even tell if a person is looking okay?”
“W-well,” Julius said, blowing out his cheeks again. He stood like that for quite a while, resembling a puffer fish without spines, so eventually, Joy pressed her palms gently to both sides of his face, and it deflated like a pierced balloon.
“I mean, your code looks neat,” he said, in the hope that it would cheer her up a little. Joy tilted her head to one side and wrinkled her brow as though she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. “There are bugs, of course, but it’s not too messy.”
Joy rolled her eyes and bumped her head into his shoulder.
“I wouldn’t rewrite you,” Julius added, and it was obvious that that was the best he could do.
She laughed softly, her forehead still resting against his collarbone. “Well, thanks. I thought there wasn’t a code for ‘nice.’ ” Suddenly, she drew back a little and clutched at his shoulder. “I almost forgot! I’ve got another story for you.”
Julius heaved an indulgent sigh and repeated, “You’re going to be late, Joy.”
“No, no, hold on, listen. Have you heard of the loneliest whale?”
He muttered, “Uh-uh,” and threw his head back, as though it were easier for him that way to wait for the end of the tale that he knew would inevitably follow.
“No, listen. There”—she pointed—“there,
in the oceans, there’s a whale somewhere, a whale who sings differently. Other whales cannot hear it, so it’s calling and calling and crying, but no one will ever answer. It’s so alone. Can you imagine? Never being able to unite with your own kind. Being condemned to just—just swim there in the dark amongst ordinary fish.”
“You know whales are not fish, right?”
“Doesn’t that make you feel at least a tiny bit sad?” Joy asked, peering into his eyes searchingly and disbelievingly. “Teensy tad? No?”
“Why? Why is it so important for you to get me to feel sad?”
“Hey, I’ve even got the recording.” Joy pulled out her phone again along with a pair of earbuds, plugged them in, and put one in Julius’s left ear and the other in her own. “Here. That’s the loneliest whale singing. Fifty-two hertz.”
She pressed the “play” button.
And so they stood, with their faces turned away from each other, listening to the lonely song together. To Joy Ramonnes, Julius was the best friend and the most wonderful weirdo she had ever known. To Julius Artin, Joy was the only friend and just a sequence of instructions, a combination of letters and numbers.
They had first met at this very place five years ago. Joy’s parents were away saving some endangered tropical penguins, and her older brother, Bill, (mistakenly believed to be looking after her in their absence) was taking advantage of the opportunity to practically live at his girlfriend’s. Joy was returning home from her dance class late in the evening, and as she was walking past the pier, she saw a boy in a gray hoodie at its far end. He was lying on his back, with his hands under his head and one leg crossed over the other, watching the sky, freezing, and getting soaked. Joy was fourteen, and she thought that those were some amazing things to be doing. She always acted the way she felt was right at the moment, so she simply went over there and lay down beside him. Julius didn’t look at her, and he didn’t say a word. Joy was silent too. After an hour of quietness, still looking skyward, he inclined his head a little toward her. Three hours later, she took his hand in hers.