The Loneliest Whale

by Lily Markova

  When morning came, he walked her home. She smiled at him serenely at the front door and vanished inside.

  The next evening, when Joy came to the pier, Julius was already there. She smiled broadly, as if they had been friends forever. He couldn’t help but grin back, shaking his head with the strangeness of it all. It was absolutely ridiculous, and yet he felt as though it were something that had been meant to happen. As though it was right.

  On the third night, he felt he could trust her enough to share his earphones with her.

  On the fourth night, she burst out laughing all of a sudden while they were lying on the pier. That was the first time Julius had heard her voice. She was just laughing and laughing and pounding the wooden planks with her orange sneakers, and it was actually a little bit funny, so he couldn’t help it again. They roared like a pair of madmen for a good ten minutes until their cheeks and stomachs hurt and their voices were hoarse. That night, she hugged him tightly before closing the door behind her.

  On the fifth night, she wrote on the back of his hand, “I’m Joy.” He laughed, confiscated the marker pen, and wrote on hers, “Yes, you are.”

  On the sixth night, he brought her a mixtape, whose cover said, “from julius, for joy.” The only thing the songs on the playlist had in common was that they didn’t make any sense. And they were beautiful in ways that only senseless things could be.

  They sat holding each other all night long, listening to the music and watching the waves. Joy knew—perhaps because she was fourteen; perhaps her age had nothing do to with the matter at all—that this was it: something kind and nice and naïve and real. Something that had always been meant to happen to her. They had found a rare treasure. From that heartwarming and untroubled moment on, nothing could ever go wrong in their lives.

  On the seventh night, he wasn’t there.

  They hadn’t spoken even once.

  It only took the young man a few seconds to acquire all this information. There were some stories about almost every person, living or dead, in his kind’s collective mind. They watched people very closely and paid special attention to those who had been, or could be, converted into something new so that they would be able to serve their noble purpose. Julius Artin happened to be one of those people.

  They selected wisely. The choice was never random. When they felt that a new threat to human survival was emerging, however underestimated by people at the time, they sought out those predisposed to become a perfect solution.

  When lung diseases had become one of the leading causes of death in industrialized countries, and the world continued sinking deeper and deeper into tobacco smoke and exhaust fumes, they turned to those who practiced various breathing techniques, and picked about a million people who were particularly diligent in exercising reduced breathing. One by one, they tracked the chosen ones down and walked past them on the streets, brushing against them, as if by accident. It was all that was required: a slight touch. A brief touch was enough to impart to them all the necessary characteristics.

  It took some of those selected longer than others, but eventually they all realized that they had transformed. There was something alien looking at them with their own eyes, and that alien didn’t need to breathe anymore. Their bodies had developed a new mechanism of gaining oxygen: The initial ability of their skin to consume it had been amplified hundredfold. The entire surface of their skin could now take in enough oxygen for the organism to stay fully functional while preventing poisonous substances from sneaking inside. If air pollution reached deadly extremes, the million people would survive, and it would be their responsibility to make mankind last.

  They had a subspecies of at least a million individuals at the ready for any occasion: the entire planet on fire or flooded, lack of fresh water, an ice age, starvation, radiation, epidemics, bio-terrorism, and many more. And they kept creating backups in case of new and enduring dangers alike as generations changed. There was nothing humans wouldn’t overcome.

  The day before Joy and Julius met, ordinary people’s scientists had been celebrating one of their greatest accomplishments so far. They had perfected their robots; they had equipped them with emotions so the little machines felt contented when they fulfilled a requested task and upset if they failed to do so. People even went so far as to train robots to be afraid of the dark, miss their owners and fellow robots, and read facial expressions. Not only were the machines capable of feeling a bit blue now, they could also offer their sad human friends consolation and sympathy.

  And that was beautiful.

  But that was ominous, too.

  Emotions had been the only thing that had made people invincible. A computer could calculate all the possible consequences of a confrontation, yes, but a human brain wasn’t capable of that. Instead, it had to come up with unexpected, sometimes insanely irrational solutions that a metal genius wouldn’t have imagined. Now the machines could have both the powerful intellect and infinite creativity. What if they learned to hate? Crave vengeance? Love someone to death? The young man’s kind couldn’t have that.

  Having sworn never to interfere in any way other than usual (for that could corrupt the natural evolutionary route of the great mass of the ordinary population), they didn’t try to warn people, nor did they attempt to destroy the innovations. They selected a million young women and men who possessed a knack for programming, and disabled their brains from decoding information gathered by their organs of perception. Now, when looking at a breathtaking sunset, the transformed ones would not see it, but they would read the code in less than a millisecond, and they would know it to be a sunset, and they would identify a million differences between this sunset and yesterday’s. And when listening to an electrifying song, they would not really hear it, but they would receive the code, and they would know if the song repeated something they had heard before, even if that familiar piece was shorter than the blink of an eye.

  Should robots become enemies of the human race, this subspecies would be able to fight back. They would be in no way inferior or disadvantaged: Their processing speed was as high as that of machines’, and their human nature allowed them to be spontaneous.

  The day before he met Joy, Julius Artin had been a fourteen-year-old with an exceptional talent for playing video games. He might have even made a couple himself—nothing too impressive, primitive graphics, though surprisingly deep gameplay. He considered learning to code more seriously sometime in the future, but for the time being he was just an ordinary teenager who didn’t like to exhaust himself too much thinking about what was to become of him, let alone all of humanity.

  The young man’s kind decided that Julius would do.

  Ever since a stranger had shouldered him as he had been dragging himself to school that morning, Julius had felt untypically edgy, although he, of course, didn’t suspect a direct connection. He could hardly sit through his lessons that day. His fingers kept drumming an anxious rhythm on the table, his shaking feet echoing the pattern against the floor, as were his clattering teeth and his madly hammering heart. Even the ringing in his ears seemed to recur with measured regularity, heard by everybody in the room. Julius generated so much noise that his classmates giggled and turned around to stare at him, and the teachers were tired by the end of the school day of asking him to stop disrupting the classes. Julius was too busy panicking to care about any of that. His brains were burning; his back was cold with sweat streaming down it. He felt as though something horrid was coming at him, but he couldn’t see what it was. The tension seemed groundless and was all the more overwhelming for that.

  When he staggered home, pale green and shivering, his mother gasped, checked his temperature, gasped one more time, steered him to her car, and drove to the nearest hospital.

  “My tentative diagnosis would be a bad case of influenza,” said the doctor, after she’d run a few basic tests. (Julius’s mother gasped again, and Julius began to tremble even harder). She recommended that the boy stay under observation for a
t least the next couple of days.

  Julius went to bed early but couldn’t fall asleep. The thin white walls of the ward let the hospital sounds through, and he kept tossing and turning and tried to cover his ears with the pillow to shut out all the coughing, and snoring, and shuffling, and teeth-grinding, but there was no escape from the thunder inside his head.

  At last, he sat up with a jerk, sprang out of bed, and proceeded to pace the room for half an hour, which to him seemed like the whole evening. Several times, he felt nauseous and rushed to the nearby bathroom, where he washed his face with icy water and tried to calm his shaky breathing, clutching the edges of the sink so hard his knuckles whitened. In the cold, sickly light of the humming and flickering lamps, his eyes in the mirror looked wrong, unfamiliar.

  It was just the fever driving him mad, Julius told himself. He couldn’t bear to stay in the ward any longer, so he sneaked out and headed for the pier. There, lying in a puddle of his own sweat and rainwater, and showered from time to time by especially high waves, he finally managed to steady himself. The evening was starry and smelled of seaweed. Julius stuck his earphones in his ears and let his favorite song drown out that stupid little voice in the back of his mind, a voice telling him how scared and lonely he felt.

  Then that quirky girl turned up, all carefree and why-the-hell-not, orange sneakers and denim overalls, and somehow her silent presence made him feel okay again.

  It was like that the entire week. Julius wouldn’t know what to do with himself in the daytime, restless, aching, almost paranoid, and only by nightfall could he quiet his mind down, after he’d run away from the hospital and meet Joy at the pier.

  On the seventh day, having made it through the hellish week of insomnia and ineffective medication, Julius Artin finally recognized himself. His body had undergone a process of painful transformation, and all he had to do now was come to terms with the change. Exhausted, he accepted his new self. And the moment he looked into his own eyes and let it all in, the pain was gone.

  Whatever had happened to his brain was incredible. He felt high on all the information that was avalanching right down on him from everywhere. There were no sounds, no smells, no faces anymore—only numbers, endless and omniscient numbers, and he could read everyone and everything as easily as if he had been given some ultimate, Universal directions for use.

  Of course, it was all too exciting, and Julius had a lot to figure out about his upgraded self, so he barely remembered a girl called Joy.

  With his flu suddenly over, Julius was told he could go home. And that was where it all got a bit complicated. It turned out his parents would be less than happy to have a superhero for a son. They were not pleased to hear the news at all. Worse still, his friends were sure he was making fun of them, and they soon got tired of him trying to explain that he could actually see their code and that not all of them were written perfectly. He ended up more alone than he had ever felt before, misunderstood by his family and alienated from his old friends.

  Julius’s dad, thoroughly irritated at his “childish jokes,” paid a bunch of counselors and therapists to fix the troubled teenager, so after several months of boycotting sessions and school, arguing, and boiling with self-righteous indignation, Julius had come to realize that he was just wasting his time and his parents’ money and it would be better for everyone if he stopped trying to prove himself. So instead, he now did his best to pretend to be normal whenever someone was around, but it became harder and harder, as each passing day of this inner loneliness estranged him further from who he used to be and made it more difficult for him to understand ordinary people. They were just numbers, after all. He comprehended how they worked, and that was enough. It wasn’t that he felt arrogant about his new abilities—he was only a program himself—it was just that establishing close relationships with others didn’t seem to him as important as before. They would never get it, anyway.

  Such were Julius’s thoughts as one evening, about a year since the last time he’d been there, he was lying at the end of the pier, looking into the sky, which consisted entirely of numbers that flared up and faded, and never stopped moving and changing, and that was to him one of the most fascinating things he’d seen.

  “Hey, you.” That was an unusual instruction for the sky. Julius turned his head to the side to look at what intervened between two of the stars. #F87217. Pumpkin Orange.

  “Hi, Joy.”

  She sat beside him and craned her neck. “So many stars tonight.”

  “Only one hundred and seventy-two.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s exactly how many you can see from here with the naked eye at this moment,” he explained.

  “Oh,” said Joy, “okay.”

  “Have you been here all year?”

  “Well, I come here a lot, yeah,” she said, her cheeks turning #C25283, Bashful Pink. “Not because of you, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” he agreed.

  “It’s just a good place to think about how everything’s more complicated than it has to be, you know?”

  “Yeah. A lot of code could be shortened, and things would still operate the way they are supposed to, if not better. Such disrespect to free space.”

  “I’ve no idea what that means,” she confessed. “Will you come here tomorrow, though? Would be cool if you did. It’s just—”

  “What?”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have any friend vacancies, would you? Because I felt really nice around you last year, and I’d love to hang out more. Sorry if I seem too clingy, I just hate losing touch with the people I like.”

  Just like that. It didn’t need to be any more complicated.

  “Hi, I’m Julius,” he said. “I’m not the same Julius you encountered last fall, so it’s very nice to meet you.”

  “Hey, I’m still the Joy the previous Julius met, and I’m very excited to meet the new Julius and all the Juliuses that will follow.”

  A deep, rich bass note interrupted the whale song: The ship had just issued its final warning.

  “So, what do you think?” Joy said, as Julius handed her back the earbud. “Pretty sad, huh?”

  “I think you definitely should hurry up.”

  “Right.” She nodded and hugged him around the shoulders again, while he held his hands out behind her in a sort of surrender gesture. “Take care, okay?”

  “You too, Joy. Beware of monkeys. See you.”

  Joy smiled almost sorrowfully, bit her lower lip so that she wouldn’t cry, and sped off. She didn’t look around much, coiling up the cord of her earbuds as she ran, and just as the young man had foreseen from the moment she’d turned to walk away from Julius, her foot landed right on the lemonade bottle and rolled out from under her. Joy soared up, then hung, for a split second, suspended horizontally two feet above the pier, and obeyed the law of gravity, her fingers clawing at the first thing they could reach: the young man’s sweater.

  That he had not expected, and stepping forward to regain his balance, he awkwardly slipped on the wretched bottle and joined Joy in her short journey to the ground.

  As the young man was falling, he (and everybody else inside his mind) thought about people. About how they had never been supposed to be like Julius Artin. About how Julius was a complete failure. He was their failure, of course.

  What if the war his subspecies had been created for actually happened, what if Julius and his kind won despite their defectiveness? What then? There would only be a million of these creatures left, creatures looking like ordinary people but very vaguely resembling them in mindset. Who would have guessed that the hope of humanity, while perfectly capable of feeling emotions, would choose to discard them as redundant and hindering? With all the sense they made and all their rationality, something beautiful was notably missing in them.

  They wouldn’t even be able to communicate with one another effectively if they were left on their own. They simply wouldn’t consider that necessary. They wouldn’t be able to cooper
ate, help one another, create. What would be the point in their surviving?

  “I’m so, so sorry,” said Joy, as she rose, panting. “I didn’t mean to grab you, much less take you along.”

  She shot out her hand to help the young man up and accidentally jerked the earbuds’ cord out of the jack. The whale call broke free: solemn and mournful, pulsating, resonating in his ears and chest, giving him the shivers.

  The bottle whistled, vibrating, like an old kettle, as if the lemonade inside it was boiling, and burst, splashing their shoes with sticky, fizzing liquid.

  The young man’s eyes widened, their pupils expanding like two supernovas. Still lying on his back, he gripped the back of his neck with both hands and started writhing. A few moments later, he pressed his palms to his ears, rolled over on his side, and curled up, his knees knocking against his chin as he shuddered.

  “JULIUS!” Joy called, standing paralyzed over the young man, unable to take her horrified gaze off him.

  “Turn. . .off,” the young man wheezed, bringing Joy out of her numbness.

  She sank to her knees and took his hand in hers. “What is it, what should I do? Tell me what I need to do to help you,” she implored, and she screamed to Julius, who had just approached them, “Call an ambulance!”

  Julius bent over the young man with incredulous curiosity on his face, an expression Joy had never before seen on it in the four years of their friendship.

  “There’s something wrong with him.”

  “Of course there’s something wrong, Jules, he’s convulsing!” Joy sounded as though she was on the brink of hysteria.

  “No, I mean his code looks weird,” said Julius, peering at the temple of the young man, who was quietly howling now.

  “Julius, for Gates’s sake, just call—”

  “Turn. . .it. . .off,” the young man whispered again, squeezing her hand. “It hurts. . . .”