The Loneliest Whale

by Lily Markova

  Joy’s alarm clock went off very early; Whale gave a start—he must have dozed off eventually. The balcony was still mantled in fog, and its dewy glass twinkled with cobwebs of red and blue lights from the street below.

  Whale leapt into the room just in time to see Joy emerge from behind the folding screen with a cup of coffee on the go and fully dressed for the day.

  “Joy—” Whale said, darting after her.

  She paused at the front door and beamed at him. “No, no, I’m all better now.”

  “You do look better,” he agreed, trying to hide the concern in his voice. Before him stood a Joy that seemed little like the frightened, jittery girl he had talked to the previous morning. This Joy emanated self-assurance and serenity, and her face bore no trace of tiredness or illness.

  “You sound like it’s a bad thing,” she said with a laugh. Why don’t you turn on the radio? It’ll jazz you up.” She winked at Whale, and without any semblance of a good-bye to Julius or even acknowledging his presence, was gone.

  Whale hesitated, biting his lips and crinkling his eyebrows, and then obediently walked to Joy’s shelves and fiddled with the old-fashioned wooden-cased radio receiver.

  “Radio Jupiter, music that sets you free, music that changes you,” the receiver responded Joy-fully. “The next song is for all the drifters out there. Get ready to relate to The World at Large by Modest Mouse, and please stay afloat!”

  “But she just left.” Whale scratched the back of his head. “How can it be her voice?”

  “It’s not live,” Julius explained. “They record announcements a day in advance.”

  Whale raised himself on tiptoe and looked over the screen. Julius was sitting, as ever, in front of the monitors, surrounded by a dozen empty coffee cups. He had dark circles under his eyes, which were so impressive that it would be fairer to say he had eyes above his dark circles.

  “I don’t get it,” Julius said, pointing at the displays. “She’s exactly like you. She has access to all the information you have—you used to have,” he corrected himself, much to Whale’s frustration. “She’s driven by the same sense of a great mission, it’s like nothing can stop her. A collective mind, too. But she’s not one of you. She’s like your mirrored reflection. Left turns into right, right turns into wrong.”

  The receiver, meanwhile, had finished warbling and spoke in Joy’s voice again. “Well, wasn’t that a rocking melody? Good morning to you all! Hope you’re having a great time, frantically trying not to be late for work you despise. Specially for you, here comes Slave to the Wage by Placebo. This is Radio Jupiter, music that makes you question your life choices, music that changes you. Remember, don’t cry; sing along!”

  Whale sank to the floor, meditating. Why would the Phaeton create a copy of itself? Phaeton. . . . To think how quickly the name had grown on him. Phaeton. . . .

  “Oh,” he said. “This is interesting.”

  “Oh, what is interesting?” said Julius.

  “Oooooh, this is very interesting,” Whale repeated, and his eyes flew open wider, just like his mouth.

  “Let me know when you’ve regained the rest of your vocabulary, will you?”

  Whale sprang to his feet and stared at Julius over the screen again. “The planet! What happened to the planet?” he demanded hastily.

  Before he answered, Julius released an indifferent and exceptionally long yawn, which (due to his somewhat machinelike, iron voice) sounded a lot like the whiz of a falling bomb. “Well, it’s just a bunch of asteroids now, isn’t it?”

  “But why?” Whale knew why, but he asked anyway. It helped him think. He felt as though he had grasped an important clue, or at least was about to seize it, and he had to be careful not to lose sight of it before he was sure where exactly it led him.

  “Torn apart by the gravitational field of another—” Julius began automatically, but slowed down toward the end of the sentence. “—planet.” He rolled around in his chair and, for once, gave Whale his undivided, frowning attention.

  “The gravitational field of Jupiter,” Whale confirmed, with a prolonged nod.

  The gears in his brain churned faster and faster. Had his kind created for themselves a counterbalance? A successor? A nemesis?

  “Can one human subspecies be dangerous to others?” asked Julius, as if reading Whale’s thoughts. Wait. . . . .An unpleasant, chilling surmise made the gears in Whale’s skull grate to a standstill. Could Julius indeed read his thoughts as fluently as he could read his DNA? Whale exhaled loudly through his nose and brushed the foolish thought away. No, of course Julius couldn’t; or else he would have had no need to copy Joy’s code in order to find out what was on and in her mind, nor would he have to ask Whale such astoundingly unintelligent questions.

  “You’re not seriously asking me that.”

  “Fair enough,” said Julius, with an unrepentant glance at the balcony, under which there was probably another portion of his failed attempts at editing humans’ source code.

  “Spiders eat spiders,” added Whale, to make sure he got his point across. “Fish eat fish. A new human subspecies is coming.” Whale himself flinched at his own tone, such a sinister edge there was to it.

  “I don’t like this.” With grim decision, Julius turned to the computers. “I’ll change her back.”

  His fingers began to spider, weaving an intricate lacy web across the keyboard, but Whale’s firm hand landed on his knuckles, stopping him.

  “Julius, you will change her to death,” said Whale sternly. “We will talk to her first.”

  “Okay, okay!” snapped Julius, jerking his arm away with a look Whale could have mistaken for that of revulsion, had he not known, all too well, that Julius was incapable of revulsion. “Just keep your tentacles off me!”

  The rest of the day Whale whiled away by slouching around the apartment, making timid forays to the fridge, and inventing foxy ways to approach Joy about her new kind and their purpose. He also remembered to keep a distrustful eye on Julius, and whenever the latter’s hands crept toward the keys, Whale lunged to halt them, to which Julius invariably grumbled something along the lines of “only meant to order pizza” and “can’t even play Sims now is what you’re saying?”

  Whether he was referring to the actual video game or the unfortunate passersby on the street below, Whale didn’t know.

  When Joy finally erupted through the front door, humming and appearing to be in an amused mood, all the unobtrusive methods of eliciting the truth from her that Whale had come up with slipped his mind, and he simply blurted out, “You have to tell me what’s going on, Joy. I know it’s happened. Let me help. Let us help.” He looked at Julius for solidarity, but he only tapped his fingertips on the desk, pointedly, very close to the keyboard.

  Whale cleared his throat nervously with an almost undetectable shake of the head. Luckily, Joy seemed to have noticed neither of those movements, determined as she evidently was to deny Julius existence.

  “Hmph.” She raised an eyebrow, dropped her backpack on the floor, and shrugged. “Let’s talk, then.” Crooning again, she danced over to the balcony, swung open the door, and motioned with a theatrical, elegant wave of her hand for Whale to pass first.

  “It’s generous of you to offer help,” she said, after closing the door behind them, “self-sacrificial, even, considering. . .” Her eyes lingered on something far under the floor. Now that she and Whale were more or less alone, there was not a vestige left of her outward light-heartedness.

  “Considering?” Whale reminded her, inclining his head to one side in an attempt to intercept her gaze.

  “Considering the scale and specifics of the threat we must eliminate.” Joy straightened up, set her shoulders back, and boldly met his eyes. “But we don’t require any additional assistance, thank you.”

  “We? Oh, Joy.” Whale clutched his forehead and groaned.

  Suddenly, it had ceased to matter who the new kind were and why they had selected her; all Whale wished at
that moment was for Joy to remember how much she had feared the transformation, how much she had dreaded to lose touch with herself. And now she had traded “I” for “we,” she conducted herself like a soldier, happy to serve and never ask questions. If the pre-transformation Joy could hear his thoughts right now, Whale knew, she would counter-accuse him of having been an unreflecting soldier his entire life. But this was unbearable—was she going to thank his kind for what they’d done to her, as Julius had?

  “Why are you giving up so soon?” he said, shaking his head. “Joy, you were so—you should fight for your ordinary self, you should be proud to be just an ordinary person.”

  Joy stared askance at him, as though to show she hadn’t ever expected to hear words like these from Whale, and truthfully, he too found them slightly foreign, even though right nevertheless.

  “Wouldn’t that be a bit. . .sub-speciesist?” she said, only half in jest, judging by her lopsided smile. “Why should we feel proud, or ashamed, of who we were born as when we had no control over it whatsoever? It wasn’t our fault or achievement.”

  “Now this is what I’m talking about!” said Whale with ardor. “I never say this—I never normally think this, really—but. . .you of all people didn’t deserve this.”

  “Silly Whale,” said Joy, suppressing a lenient smile that made him wonder if he had actually said something particularly unwise, “I wasn’t better than other people, I was just the only one you’d met. It’s harder to use us as tools when you know us personally, isn’t it?”

  It was reassuring that she’d used “I” to talk about the ordinary Joy, less so that she was referring to her in the past tense.

  “That much is true,” said Whale, embarrassed, but he added stubbornly, “and still, it’s unfair that they changed you. I’m sorry.”

  The corners of Joy’s lips drooped, and her eyebrows curled into an alarmed frown.

  “They changed me? What?”

  “The new subspecies, the ones who are making so much noise inside your head—can you still fight them?”

  “Fight them?” Joy looked positively shocked now, with her new, alien eyes narrowed as though to protect what was behind them. “I’m their leader. Our leader. Why would I want to fight them?”

  “Leader, is that right?” Whale stalled. He was having difficulty wrapping his head around this one. The Phaeton didn’t have a leader; they were some sort of utopian cross between a democracy and an anarchy. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  It was more of a rhetorical question, Whale’s uttered regret that there was no way to undo what had happened, but Joy did answer.

  “We couldn’t let Jul—Julius get in the way,” she faltered. “He’s clever, he’d have figured something out. What we didn’t foresee, though, is that you would change your mind.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You created us, Whale!” Joy threw up her hands with impatience. “Don’t you recall? The moment you fell—at the pier, remember?—you squeezed my hand”—she showed him how by clutching his—“you sent the rest of the Phaeton a threat signal. And they made us. You made me.” She studied him for a brief moment, then gave a perplexed shrug and looked away. “I guess it wasn’t really conscious, then. . . . Doesn’t matter, anyway. Our task is almost completed.”

  Whale stumbled away from her until his back hit the cold glass of the opposite wall. He remembered agonizing on the wet wooden planks and drifting away, he remembered gripping Joy’s hand—and then, darkness.

  “Oh, no,” breathed Whale. “I didn’t want that. I didn’t mean to—” He must have launched the conversion process by accident, a second before he had fainted, when his brain had been mushy with pain. But one hundred million people? Talk about a costly inadvertence!

  Whale’s lungeyeart shrank with shame, prickling. No wonder his family were mad at him. He had told them there had been a need to act, and they hadn’t questioned it, even though no usual research or calculations had been done; they never questioned any one of them. If they did, that would be the same as if an ordinary person started doubting one of their eyes: pure madness. But of course, once the Phaeton had realized that Whale had been almost asleep when he’d struck “the emergency button” and there had been no way to reverse the transformation without risking a hundred million lives, they had become very upset with him.

  He glanced up at Joy. She unlocked her phone and almost instantly locked it again and tucked it into her jacket pocket, from which Whale concluded that she had been checking the time or new messages. Either way, she looked as though she was waiting for something to happen. Our task is almost completed, she’d said. What danger had his sinking, hurting mind imagined? If he was the one to have changed Joy, what had he done that for?

  “What task would that be?” he said stiffly.

  “Well, what was on your mind when you were creating us?” Joy’s tone rang with tolerant, forgiving humor again, as though Whale were a very thick student struggling to even pronounce the name of the subject correctly. “What threat?”

  Whale strained his brains. “I don’t. . .Julius! I was thinking about how under no circumstances should people become like Julius.”

  “Excellent!” Joy nodded and gave him the same half-surprised, half-approving look she had given Julius at the pier when he’d managed to make proper small talk for a change, but Whale was hardly in the mood for relishing his sudden brilliance. If the new kind was the solution, and the problem was Julius Artin and the like—

  “Joy, what is it you’re going to do?”

  “Look, you know it yourself. We cannot let advanced subspecies modify ordinary people as they please. We cannot let them experiment on us and get away with it. People must remain pure. They must evolve naturally.”

  “So, what, you want to take their new abilities away? They might die!” Whale strode over to Joy and grasped her shoulders, peering imploringly into her face. “Please, Joy, I told you, they might die! Julius—”

  “WE KNOW!” she interrupted, wriggling free of his grip. “Exactly! Everyone the Phaeton has altered, two billion human beings, might die, and whose fault is that? You, the Phaeton, did what you believed was right,” she said, a little softer, “you were well aware that someone might get hurt, but it never stopped you, because you deemed your mission much bigger than individual lives. We have a mission, too, Whale. And we believe in it strongly with all of our hearts. And as for Jules”—Joy grimaced, probably scolding herself for forgetting to use his full first name—“he’s trying to edit people. Edit the world. This is just wrong. No one should be able to do that.”

  “Julius?” called Whale, his head turned a little toward the balcony door, but his eyes fixed on Joy, as if she wouldn’t be able to move as long as he kept her in sight. “Are you getting this?”

  “Yes,” Julius’s muffled voice drawled impassively. Joy gave a barely perceptible start.

  “You have to stay away from her. If she’s the reverse side of the Phaeton, then all she needs to do is touch you.” Whale more than welcomed the idea of disarming Julius, but not if that meant possibly dis-heading him as well.

  “I control a hundred million bodies,” said Joy, quietly yet resolutely. “There’s no point in running from me.”

  Whale squinted at her, wondering why she hadn’t struck yet. “But you’re waiting for something?”

  “New subspecies are only the consequences. Ramifications. We can take away their abilities, but the Phaeton will simply create more. You will negate the results of our work, you will neutralize us. No, we’ll deal with the mess afterward. First, we must finish what you’ve made us for, what the Phaeton couldn’t do on their own: eradicate the main threat.”

  “Which is—?”

  Joy bowed her head a little, as though to say that he already knew.

  “Us?” gasped Whale. “The Phaeton? You’re just going to kill us? All of us? You wouldn’t—”

  “Of course not!” cried Joy, looking insulted and even more dazed by such an ass
umption than Whale himself was. “We’re not barbarians! If there is a way to avoid bloodshed, we will. We only need to separate you. Look at you. When you’re alone, you’re useless. You’re not dangerous. You won’t be able to hurt anyone anymore.”

  “No, no, you would never have said this. This isn’t you, it’s the program I’ve loaded into your head that’s talking. And I didn’t mean to—please, please, Joy, they’re my family!”

  She patted him on the arm. “I’m sorry. As I said, it’s basically done.”

  “You can’t,” said Whale, shaking his head still more vigorously, “you can’t pull the Phaeton apart. It’s impossible. It would take so much energy that you’d blow up the planet in the process!”

  “I’ve already done it once, remember?” She gave him that new smile again, a condescending, pitying one, and Whale’s hand flew involuntarily to the back of his neck. “Well, not the ‘blow up the planet’ part, of course. That’s why I was appointed as our leader. I already had experience in cutting one of you off.”

  “Julius?” Whale called loudly again.

  “Working on it,” came the muted answer.

  “Jules, Jules. . . .” Her back still turned to the room, Joy clicked her tongue and demanded in tones of mock, smarmy condemnation, “Are you going to rewrite me, Jules?”

  It went a little quieter, as if some continuous noise had stopped, a noise so chronically habitual one only became aware of it once it was over, like the low hum of a fridge or the ticking of a clock. Whale reached for the door handle, turned it, and pushed the door ajar, his fingers still at the handle in case Joy tried to run away on them again. The crack revealed to him the cause of this uncanny quietness: Julius wasn’t typing.

  “What’s wrong? Why have you stopped?”